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Old 13.08.2015, 03:28 PM
MBTC MBTC is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mrdos View Post
Regardless, I will say, I guess it only makes sense that it outputs a "digital" waveform (at least having the option) because the whole reason I and most people use digital synths is for a digital sound... That's the style of music after all.
I think what Timo's example illustrates though is that a digital synth can emulate just about anything an analog synth can do (with regard to what the human ear would be able to distinguish). Even to the point of getting somewhat randomized "flavor" to each oscillator to emulate what happens with unstable voltage controlled behavior.

Whether they do or not in practice is really a different story, because of course those kinds of features actually end up requiring a lot of processing power - this is one of the reasons newer analog modeling synths gobble up a lot of CPU.

Believe it or not, the Freescale DSPs that are in the Virus are not particularly powerful. In fact they are so yesteryear that I believe that lack of innovation in the chip line might be one factor holding back the Virus product line from moving forward. Supposedly Christoph Kemper cut his programming teeth on these chips (formerly Motorola 68 series), so basically he is deeply invested in them. This is perhaps one reason he decided to work on new audio related products that are based around this chip rather than to explore using alternative chips for the next generation of Viruses.

When I say they are not particularly powerful, I only mean that the CPU that is in your PC or Mac (hell, probably the chip that is in your phone) is capable of much more (including floating point operations). Now a synth DSP does have a lot of advantages, for one thing it does not have to juggle music making while running a general purpose operating system that might be also checking your email or refreshing web pages at the same time, and that greatly simplifies the tasks it has at hand. Also, I remember reading that these Freescale chips have specialized parallel filter processors, which might help explain what many regard as the Virus' most noticeable characteristic (fast/aggressive filters), and some could say that these chips are "designed for" audio algorithms in the sense that they may do things more efficiently from a power consumption standpoint, but in terms of overall processing power they are no where close to something like an Intel Core i7 or a modern gaming GPU.

If there is something holding soft synths back, it may be an over-reliance on mediocre open-source algorithms. I think sometimes plug-in makers may not have the background or knowledge to write all the audio processing code from scratch (nor time to learn it all), so they fall back on the same previously-written open-source algorithms that every other "quick and cheap" plugin maker is using, which often results in a dull, "same old" sound syndrome. This is why some plug-ins just seem to bring a better sound to the table, more talented programmers, more specialized algorithms, and just more time spent toward a finished product. It took the Virus many generations and years to get to where it is today, and I don't know how many plug-in makers are going to put in that level of dedication when a plugin only sells for a couple of hundred bucks a copy, one copy gets sold for every 500 copies that get pirated, etc.

Honestly there are times when I'm running the Virus side by side with Dune2 and I wish the Virus could sound as rich as Dune2. That said, Dune2 can gobble up a huge amount of CPU with a rich unison patch, and there are certainly some things the Virus does better.
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