[sdiy] Solaris at NAMM

Benjamin Budts mailing at gigaspeeds.be
Mon Jan 25 11:25:05 CET 2010 

It looked promising and I fell into the trap of liking it instantly :p

But after checking the whole website of solaris and thinking about it a 
couple of days :

- For a synth being developed for years i'm not that impressed.
- It's another virtual analogue synthesizer that will probably give the 
ice cold perfect sound :p .
- Routing of the effects, I already have that in my Roland JD-990, and 
there's even more FX in there...
There doesn't seem to be REVERB ? That's a pity...
- Something that looks cool is you can import wavs and play em, but I 
already have an akai S5000 sampler that offers more concerning sampling 
etc... so not impressed either.

It's one big VST plugin with a nice design if you ask me :-) .

The price was EXCL VAT, so for Belgium you would have to add another 21% 
+ shipping...
This makes this synth too expensive :-/

Kind regards,
Benjamin

Richard Wentk wrote:
> Solaris is probably a bit cheaper though. :)
>
> But yes - synthesis has in fact stalled. You *have* to do clever algorithmic things to make really special noises, and clever algorithmic things turn out to be desperately hard to do well. (Or in some cases, at all.)  
>
> So we have products like Solaris, which are basically simulations of other stuff that are easy to understand, and easy to work with, and make pleasant sounds, but don't push the envelope at all.
>
> For comparison see the Hal Alles synth from the 1970s. It eventually turned into the Synergy and Crumar GDS, but the bare version was an open bank of oscillators, multipliers and minimal filters that you could patch together ad lib. 
>
> Since you basically needed at least a degree and more likely a PhD to understand how to use it, it was a one off. Likewise the Di Giugno 4X machines at Ircam. 
>
> What's frustrating is that there are no equivalent R&D efforts happening today. There's a lot of hobbyist interest, especially in alternative interfaces, and some mainstream academic effort in that direction too. But - so far as I know - there are no ground breaking Alles, Moorer or Di-Giugno-style synthesis projects happening. 
>
> There's also little or no musical AI, which is something that could easily have been pushed further than it has been - not in a playalonga way, but to create context- and performance-dependent synthesis.
>
> Here's the Alles synth and Laurie Spiegel from 1977:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWKDsfARXMc
>
> Richard
>
>
> On 20 Jan 2010, at 19:50, cheater cheater wrote:
>
>   
>> I like my 816 but it is not a supercomputer, in fact due to a 'trick'
>> people at Stanford came up with the whole algorithm could be executed
>> with simple additions and the output had to go through a single LUT.
>>
>> Nope, the THX Deep Note was not done on a Synclavier. It was also not
>> a CS-80. And it is not an organ and not a recording. It is an
>> algorithmically produced sound created by Dr James 'Andy' Moorer with
>> the use of a mainframe computer on which a program ran (what could be
>> called a DSP program, if the term DSP had existed then), all this at
>> the Lucasfilm computer division. I know little about what the hardware
>> was actually, but here's what the algorithm was doing according to
>> Moorer:
>>
>> " I could get about 30 oscillators running in real-time on the device.
>> (...) The oscillators were not simple - they had 1-pole smoothers on
>> both amplitude and frequency."
>>
>> "20,000 lines of code [written in C] produce about 250,000 lines of
>> statements of the form "set frequency of oscillator X to Y Hertz" "
>>
>> So, considering that this is about 13 seconds of sound and 'Andy's
>> recollection of the numbers is correct, that is an update rate between
>> 640 Hz and 19.2 kHz depending on how those "statements" looked. That's
>> quite a good amount of performance and I would take a bet that not
>> much worse than the Solaris. Bear in mind that the calculation in the
>> solaris does not happen at 96kHz, it's just the output rate. The
>> algorithms probably get updated at a lower rate. Maybe 2 kHz, that's
>> the standard right now - ever wondered why VAs have LFOs that only go
>> up to 2kHz? That's why.
>>
>> Considering that the Solaris still isn't out and the THX sound was
>> made on something that has existed 30 years ago, I think the
>> comparison is quite fair.
>>
>> D.
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 20:23, Graham Atkins <gatkins at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>>     
>>> Yes Cheater,
>>>
>>> You're absolutely right, that was done on the Synclavier which does
>>> have a lot of power. You could also include the Yamaha TX816 I suppose
>>> which could also make some impressive noises.
>>>
>>> Graham
>>>
>>> On 20 Jan 2010, at 16:54, cheater cheater wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfg9DVwOd9w
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 17:40, Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> On 20 Jan 2010, at 14:44, Richard Wentk wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>>>>> It's basically a 1980s instrument that's very late - like a PPG Realizer
>>>>>> that actually works (or will work) - not a 2010s instrument that's ahead
>>>>>> of
>>>>>> the game.
>>>>>>             
>>>>> That's a bit unfair, I reckon. Show me a single 80's synth that has
>>>>> anything
>>>>> like the processing power in Solaris. It's got 6 SHARC processors, and
>>>>> does
>>>>> all it's audio calculation in 32-bit floating point at 96KHz. That's
>>>>> definitely a 21st century specification.
>>>>>
>>>>> Whether it does anything genuinely new with all that power is obviously a
>>>>> separate question.
>>>>>
>>>>> T.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Synth-diy mailing list
>>>>> Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
>>>>> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Synth-diy mailing list
>>>> Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
>>>> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
>>>>         
>>>
>>>       
>> _______________________________________________
>> Synth-diy mailing list
>> Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
>> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
>>     
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Synth-diy mailing list
> Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy
>
>

More information about the Synth-diy mailing list