Moog Music Forum

I have a few times got a great sound on the Voyager and then emulated it so well on digital gear that I use the digital version for convenience, polyphony and multitimbral setups. The Voyager lets you explore sounds which you might never have set on digital synths. But that's what is great about a TB-303: other synths can sound similar but its so easy on a real 303. In the same way, other synths can do much of the Voyager sounds, but programming on the Voyager is more natural.

B

Listen to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRuFQivgaxk

That a Korg M3 expansion board. Sounds quit a bit analogue doesn't it? I have heard thsi debate before and I am not sure what side I fall on it. Clearly there is a difference but how significant I am not sure. What I love about analogue as much if not more than the sound is is the ability to use CVs in creative ways.

LivePsy wrote:I have a few times got a great sound on the Voyager and then emulated it so well on digital gear that I use the digital version for convenience, polyphony and multitimbral setups. The Voyager lets you explore sounds which you might never have set on digital synths. But that's what is great about a TB-303: other synths can sound similar but its so easy on a real 303. In the same way, other synths can do much of the Voyager sounds, but programming on the Voyager is more natural.

B

I agree. Looks, its this simple. I can get a mic and sample a Voyager and load it into my M3 and and its going to sound like a Voyager as much as a CD of a Voyager sounds like a voyager. Ultimately, its all being recorded to digital right?

Now I love my M3. Its a great synth. What I can do with it that a Voyager can't is create incredibly complex layered sounds with effects and a wide range of controllers including sophistited control mixers that work almost like CVs. You can pretty much use the controllers to control just about anything. A real strength of this synth and it sounds great.

Now I still may want to buy a Voyager. Why? Because its a different animal. I does not play by the same rules. I like this last post because yes, you can get simiilar sounds on say a Voyager and and M3 expecially with the Radius inside but the way you control a Voyager is what makes it special and I believe with the expansion box, its a real attractive option.

It may take me a few years to save for one but I beginning to find this little synth very desirable.

Does this mean I am selling my M3? Not a chance. Nor my soft synths. Just tools in an arsenal of sounds that can be mixed and combined.

Lux, nothing beats the Moog filter. I also have an M3, the filters for EDS and Radias programs are good but not Moog good Something about fast filter envelopes on the Korg don't sound right to me and its hard to sweep the filter manually without some stepping. The only time I have heard stepping on the Voyager is turning the filter frequency knob when self oscillating - a case for getting an Old School if you really are a fanatic. However the Korg is very good and most digital synths are similar regarding filters and envelopes.

The Voyager is irreplaceable for some sounds. But that's the reason to spend considerable money on a single note synth - sometimes that one note is worth it.

Cheers,
B

LivePsy wrote:Lux, nothing beats the Moog filter. I also have an M3, the filters for EDS and Radias programs are good but not Moog good Something about fast filter envelopes on the Korg don't sound right to me and its hard to sweep the filter manually without some stepping. The only time I have heard stepping on the Voyager is turning the filter frequency knob when self oscillating - a case for getting an Old School if you really are a fanatic. However the Korg is very good and most digital synths are similar regarding filters and envelopes.

The Voyager is irreplaceable for some sounds. But that's the reason to spend considerable money on a single note synth - sometimes that one note is worth it.

Cheers,
B

I don't disagree with what you are saying. For lush textures I love the M3. But I also know that there are some souds the the Voyager and other analogues make that can't be reproduced on an M3 unless you sample them. Of course, you wan't do this in real time and move knobs around and that is the magic of the Voyager. If I had the money, I would get one right now. I do have some foogers and as you know, the M3 is not cheap so I am in saving mode right now.

Hope you can enjoy a Moog someday

Slightly off topic, but I've yet to meet to meet a digital synth that can pass the "Winkels Test" (sort of like the Turing Test, but easier to replicate).

What is the Winkels Test? Simple. Take a polyphonic synth. Set up a fairly harmonically rich sustaining patch with some detuning and motion in it (a thick string sound is good). Set the oscillator pitches relatively high (equivalent to 4' and 2' footages). Play a Cm7 chord at the very top of the keyboard.

Hear that? Aliasing (or whatever term you choose to use). Sounds like crap to my ears, drives me nuts when it occurs and I've never been able to find a purely digital synth that doesn't have the problem.

I eagerly await the day I don't hear that. That's when I'll buy digital synths.

Christopher Winkels wrote:Slightly off topic, but I've yet to meet to meet a digital synth that can pass the "Winkels Test" (sort of like the Turing Test, but easier to replicate).

What is the Winkels Test? Simple. Take a polyphonic synth. Set up a fairly harmonically rich sustaining patch with some detuning and motion in it (a thick string sound is good). Set the oscillator pitches relatively high (equivalent to 4' and 2' footages). Play a Cm7 chord at the very top of the keyboard.

Hear that? Aliasing (or whatever term you choose to use). Sounds like crap to my ears, drives me nuts when it occurs and I've never been able to find a purely digital synth that doesn't have the problem.

I eagerly await the day I don't hear that. That's when I'll buy digital synths.

With most software synths, when using a 96khz sampling/playback frequency, they won't show or exhibit aliasing noise or artifacts when playing such high notes. On hardware digital synths however, the usual 44khz/48khz sampling playback rate isn't high enough to alleviate the problem.

The Nyquist-Shannon theorem roughly states: the highest frequency you can play without aliasing is about half of the sampling frequency. So, with 96khz you should be able to play a 48khz note (inaudible to the human ear) without aliasing. That's the theory. But in reality, most complex waveforms contain harmonics much higher than the fundamental. So to be safe, let's divide that in two. That would give us 96khz = 24khz playback aliasing free. Which isn't too bad since most of us can't hear anything passed 22khz. But for 44khz = 11khz this is clearly unacceptable. There are tricks that help, like low-pass filtering and oversampling, but they are not perfect solutions.

In performing the "Winkels Test" on my soft synths (most of which passed at 96khz) and hardware digital synths (most of which failed miserably, except the Ion which uses tricks like filtering and oversampling, but still failed to some extent), I was intrigued with your choice of a Cm7 chord. Since this exhibits "aliasing-like" overtones with the interacting notes of the chord when played this high. Even on a Prophet08 it sounds sort of "aliasy".

I think a preliminary test could be to play a single C note, at the highest possible frequency on the synth, with a pulse waveform (high harmonic content) , and then slowly bend the pitch up or down 2 semitones or more. If any aliasing is present, don't worry you'll hear it loud and clear!
Of course the Moog Voyager passes this test easily!

Then, if you don't hear any aliasing, you could step-up and perform the Winkels Test. But that's a bit more difficult on a Moog (unless you happen to have 4 Voyagers on hand!), except perhaps on the Memorymoog or Polymoog.

My 2 cents.

Music doesn't require high frequencies. There is no point in accurate harmonics of a rich wave for notes around c7 and up because there's no useful musical information in the harmonics of a high note. I'm not referring to sound reproduction, but what can be expressed as music. BTW, the difference frequencies in a high Cm7 are so bad, that you should never attempt one without medical advice.

The waveforms from the Voyager are not perfect, as the saw and square shapes are quite rounded. Don't compare it with digital, because for waveform accuracy digital is going to be better. I personally consider aliasing to be something to avoid much like a guitarist avoids unneeded strings from ringing, rather than chuck the synth in the bin because you can get it to sound bad. Every synth is good at something...

B

Interesting that you mention the P'08, because I purchased one largely because it's one of the few "affordable" (I use the term reluctantly) new polyphonic synths. I don't hear aliasing, but I can make it distort and get some interesting overtones. The latter I don't mind nearly as much.

Another bit that bugs me with a typical digital synth is that it's tough to do straightforward things like PWM without introducing glitchiness or fudging . With a garden variety 44kHz sampling rate a note played at A440 has a theoretical 100 samples per cycle. It tends to sound just fine. Play that note three octaves higher (3,520 Hz) though and there are only about 12 (well, 12.5, but I'm rounding for simplicity) data points per cycle. With a 50% pulse duty cycle that means only 6 data points are used to represent the positive half of the wave. That translates into a 43% pulse wave being replicated exactly the same way as a 50% pulse since there simply aren't enough clock ticks to tell the difference. Sure, there are methods to fudge it (oversampling, good programming, etc.), but that seems like a poor substitute for what should really be done.

I can never figure out why we could engineer synths to spit out a sampling rate of 30kHz+ way back 25 years ago (DX-7, et al), but for some reason digital synthesizers have concentrated on generating gobs of note with only incrementally better sonic quality. Two years back I rather stupidly bought a Roland Fantom that aliased as badly as my (then sixteen year old) Korg Wavestation. A decade and a half had quadrupled polyphony but improved apparent fidelity not one whit. I wish there was a Moore's Law for digital synths. Failing that, I'd love an eight-voice unit that sounds magic rather than 128 notes of crapitude.

Christopher Winkels wrote: I can never figure out why we could engineer synths to spit out a sampling rate of 30kHz+ way back 25 years ago (DX-7, et al), but for some reason digital synthesizers have concentrated on generating gobs of note with only incrementally better sonic quality. Two years back I rather stupidly bought a Roland Fantom that aliased as badly as my (then sixteen year old) Korg Wavestation. A decade and a half had quadrupled polyphony but improved apparent fidelity not one whit. I wish there was a Moore's Law for digital synths. Failing that, I'd love an eight-voice unit that sounds magic rather than 128 notes of crapitude.

Winkels, you are my new best friend! They just don't put enough cpu power into envelopes, filters and audio frequency modulation in digital hardware synths. Its quite audible and yet few complain about it.

B

Christopher Winkels wrote:Interesting that you mention the P'08, because I purchased one largely because it's one of the few "affordable" (I use the term reluctantly) new polyphonic synths. I don't hear aliasing, but I can make it distort and get some interesting overtones. The latter I don't mind nearly as much.

Another bit that bugs me with a typical digital synth is that it's tough to do straightforward things like PWM without introducing glitchiness or fudging . With a garden variety 44kHz sampling rate a note played at A440 has a theoretical 100 samples per cycle. It tends to sound just fine. Play that note three octaves higher (3,520 Hz) though and there are only about 12 (well, 12.5, but I'm rounding for simplicity) data points per cycle. With a 50% pulse duty cycle that means only 6 data points are used to represent the positive half of the wave. That translates into a 43% pulse wave being replicated exactly the same way as a 50% pulse since there simply aren't enough clock ticks to tell the difference. Sure, there are methods to fudge it (oversampling, good programming, etc.), but that seems like a poor substitute for what should really be done.

I can never figure out why we could engineer synths to spit out a sampling rate of 30kHz+ way back 25 years ago (DX-7, et al), but for some reason digital synthesizers have concentrated on generating gobs of note with only incrementally better sonic quality. Two years back I rather stupidly bought a Roland Fantom that aliased as badly as my (then sixteen year old) Korg Wavestation. A decade and a half had quadrupled polyphony but improved apparent fidelity not one whit. I wish there was a Moore's Law for digital synths. Failing that, I'd love an eight-voice unit that sounds magic rather than 128 notes of crapitude.

I totally agree with you that current digital synths should perform WAY better given current DSP technology. But I guess it's all a matter of making money rather than spending it on R&D. Roland is famous for coming up with seriously underpowered digital synths! Even Alesis, with their analog Andromeda made the same mistake. They had a brilliant idea, come up with a 16 voice analog synth controlled by digital technology. Unfortunately, they underpowered it with a weak Coldfire processor resulting in a fantastic analog beast, with a LOT of digital quirks and low resolution lfos at fast speeds, etc... Exhibiting the same limitations of some early hybrid synths. But at least there's no aliasing on an A6...

With the current state of the digital technology, we should be able to buy an all digital polyphonic VA that would be indistinguishable from a real analog synth, with bandwidth headroom to spare, and extreme resolution of parameters (32 bits real time encoding at ultra high sampling speeds). Sort of High Definition for the ears.

But we can keep on dreaming... Or wait endlessly for Moog to put out a modern version of the Memorymoog. (not gonna happen)

By the way, this is turning out to be a very interesting "slightly off-topic" topic.

Christopher Winkels wrote:Slightly off topic, but I've yet to meet to meet a digital synth that can pass the "Winkels Test" (sort of like the Turing Test, but easier to replicate).
snip
I eagerly await the day I don't hear that. That's when I'll buy digital synths.

Interesting! I guess we all had a test or two when it comes to digital artifacts. I had the Minimoog test for digital delays. Back in the 80's the digital delays I was able to test wouldn't pass. Just take a high note on the Mini, say a dual osc 8' unison patch, and move the pitch wheel around with the delay. If it was crap you would hear these ring mod type sidebands. My tape echoplex was smooth at those high frequency bends.
But I never noticed any strange artifacts with the high notes on my old 80's 8-bit digital oscillators? So I tried the Winkels test just to see. Played a minor 7 th chord on both a digital and analog poly, and swept many octaves up to as high as they both would go and recorded them. No FX as some of those would not pass since some of those delays are digital.
I did not notice any objectional artifacts. I used an early 80's 8-bit digital and a late 70's analog. Was woried an MP3 would change the test but here it is. The first one sweeps faster as I was controlling the sweep manually on both with 7 or so octaves. It's difficult to tell the digital from the analog? Good digital oscillators?
Winkels test on digital and analog