MATRIXSYNTH: SonicProjects OP-X


Thursday, April 12, 2007

SonicProjects OP-X

"The OB-X saw the light of earth in 1979 and was the first fully programmable polyphonic synth built by Tom Oberheim. It's the direct successor to the famous SEM based units. The secret of the OB-X is that it still has the old discrete 12db SEM-filters. All later units such as OB-Xa, OB8 and Matrix as well as many competing products made the use of the more sterile Curtis filterchips. This fact makes the OB-X one of the best sounding polyphonic synths of all time. Experts put the OB-X in the same league as the Memorymoog. We love this synth!!

The secret of analog behaviour: OB-X Voiceboards Various methods have been used in the plugins world to copy analog behaviour. SonicProjects has made a new and different approach. By extensive exploring of the real device it became obvious that a big part of the organic feeling comes from the minor differences in sound between the voices. This has nothing to to with random behaviour but with device tolerances and slightly different trimpot settings. SonicProjects has implemented this behaviour into the virtual device. There are four global buttons which let you control the detunings of the oscillators, filters, envelopes and portamento times."

Title link takes you there. Via this VSE post where you will find a couple of samples by , chnarles, also mirrored here.

Previous OP-X posts

8 comments:

  1. Wait, you're just NOW getting it? What the hell? The instability, non-exacting tolerances and other quirky features are what give analog synths life. This is why software synths lose. Yes, you can pretend to mimick these inconsistencies but you're still coding it and therefore its consistent.

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  2. seriously, they make it sound like they're the first one to try to model components and tolerances etc.. of course that's what they all do - then give it there own stupid name... and 95% of the time the soft synths sound like crap.

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  3. Well that's not entirely true... The tolerances of the analog componontry are within a certain range (or else the output would not be, and it would not be useful as a synthesiser)

    As such, it's always theoretically possible to model the individual components to generate a waveform, but instead, current DSP methodologies tend to operate by modelling the end result of an entire circuit. This allows the machine to circumvent the requirement for processing each and every component, thereby freeing up CPU and making the theoretical possibility more realistic given current processing capabilities.

    This plugin is not the first to model separate parts of the circuit in order to increase realism, and given increased processing power I suspect that we will see more and more of this kind of thing in future. Of course it would be possible to have a library of modelled electronic components which could be assembled with a virtual circuit diagram, and it would be a heck of a gimmick, so who knows...

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  4. where oh where is the gmedia SOB ???

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  5. if I resume , their plug has a best sound than the obx A or later matrix.

    It' s a shame as I own an obxa thats far away in sound quality than their sound demo.

    For the others, just listen in their demo comparison: the portamento and pulse sound. They just could' nt reproduce it. The portamento is very confuse, and the filter on the pulse sound has a bad resonance

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  6. well, I tried the demo... and it sounds really good. Why not putting the comparison aside and simply enjoy the sound?
    We all know that no vst clone sounds like the original counterpart... so...

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  7. I was annoyed above in my post because the blurb made it sound like component modeling is uncommon or is a better way that the majority don't do. My point was they all do it that way. korg calls is CMT, Arturia calls it TAE, etc...
    I haven't heard this one so I'll reserve judgement.. but that marketing-like blurb was lame.

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  8. Never a Mac AU version of these things... sigh.

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