I know Vanguard sounds good, but the interface doesn't inspire me for sh*t!

quote:

Originally posted by Derivative The Virus saw wave sounds a bit like a Minimoog saw wave. If I didn't know better I would say that it was modelled on the Minimoog's saw. What a digital oscillator sounds like depends on alot of things. How it was synthesized additively, its contour and whether it has been oversampled and to what degree. Ideally it would be best to oversample at 192khz with a low pass filter over 22khz as this would push the Nyquist frequency faaar above the entire audible range of human hearing so that even extreme foldback from Nyquist manifests well above the highest frequency the human ear can hear. For various reasons Vanguard's oscillators alias like mad. You can actually hear it which makes me wonder what kind of samplerate this synth is operating at internally. Even the non aliasing oscillators alias like crazy (although audibly less - try it yourself by A/Bing between them). If a saw wave is a carrier wave that contains all harmonics, both odd and even in linearly descending amplitude up the scale, then the upper frequency ranges that exceed Nyquist will foldback. So Vanguard has a really messy top end and you can hear it so badly on hipassed sounds. I should also say that the Virus's oscillators also alias but not nearly as much. However, I dislike the sound of the Virus oscillators alot. ImpOSCar's straight square wave is just so much more powerful than the Viruses. So is its saw and every degree of its PWM square. The thing that makes the Virus sound good is its filter (without extreme saturation) and its modulation capability in the form of its LFOs and envelopes. The oscillators themselves sound incredibly weak without a tonne of effects. And despite the fact that the Virus has a very Minimoog like saw wave oscillator, you can't really make convincing Moog leads on it because the Virus Filter sounds absolutely nothing like the Minimoog's Filter and doesn't behave in the same wave. And the Filter is what makes the Minimoog.

Access released a patch for the virus to make the filters sound like the minimoog filters.

Do you mean the Moog filter on the VC and up? Because I've fiddled with that and it doesn't really sound like a moog filter and it doesn't step like a moog filter does at high resonance (it doesn't really step, but it jumps because the moog filter gets a *really* narrow peak around the cutoff when you increase resonance). The VC moog filter does sound nice though.

reFX has released version 1.6.1 of Vanguard

Changes in v1.6

Sound:

* A small bug in the wavetable-player of the oscillators has been fixed. This bug switched to the wrong wavetables in the upper-octaves, which lead to a slightly uncleaner sound.
* The setup-page has a new option called “output exciter”. This exciter has always been enabled in previous versions, but has now been made optional for a smoother overall sound.


Maybe this fixes some of the issues people mentioned?

quote:

Originally posted by s-cube reFX has released version 1.6.1 of Vanguard Changes in v1.6 Sound: * A small bug in the wavetable-player of the oscillators has been fixed. This bug switched to the wrong wavetables in the upper-octaves, which lead to a slightly uncleaner sound. * The setup-page has a new option called “output exciter”. This exciter has always been enabled in previous versions, but has now been made optional for a smoother overall sound. Maybe this fixes some of the issues people mentioned?

Actually, they're on 1.6.3 now, which makes the vibrato even more leetsauce.

Nevermind this post.

Last edited by AuxiliaryInput on Mar-03-2007 at 13:01

I can hear the difference, but it sounds like it cuts out all the high EQ. I don't know. (Output exciter)

The new Age knob sounds like a really fast LFO with 5 detune. Or, a noise FM thingy.


Interesting updates, but I'm not changing my opinion. .D