Tony Allgood on Propellerheads Thor

The following came in on the AH list from Tony Allgood of Oakley Sound Systems. I thought it was an interesting perspective.

"> Anyone had a chance of trying out the new THOR synth in Reason...

Yes. I've been a Reason user for quite some time now, and I signed up for 4.0 as soon as it came out. I don't tend to use Reason these days much though, but I thought that Thor would be useful. Indeed, my first thoughts were that it was very good. However, the more I played with it the things I found on it that I didn't like.

The filter's overdrive is no where near right. There's a harshness about it that sounds simply like Reason's own distortion unit. It has two modes for some reason - something about the overdrive being applied at different points in the filter. Anyway, it doesn't sound right.

The other thing is that the filter is not 'always on', I guess to conserve CPU. This means that at low frequencies and high resonance you can hear it 'warming up' at the start of every note. On a real synth, the VCF is always connected and always ready to accept its input. In Thor it must start at the same initialised state for every note. This means that every attack sounds wrong - its takes a while for resonance to start. Other VSTi do this much better.

The 'Moog' filter mode is the best one, but really its nowhere near as good as the donation ware ASynth.

The oscillators alias quite badly. The FM one is really easy to hear this, but the analog one does it too. Running Reason at 88.2kHz helps.
Expect aliasing at levels of around -55dB, which is pretty bad these days.

You can't detune them very easily. They're just too accurate in pitch.
ie. play an octave and they phase lock. Yuck.

The modulation matrix is good, but its a shame there's only two knobs on the front panel.

The wavetable oscillator is excellent. Limited waveforms though, but the PPG clones are wonderful.

CPU is quite high in comparison to the other Reason synths.

The note allocation, legato and glide modes are good. The EGs are not bad at all. Perfectly linear attack, but exponential decay and release.
Almost identical to the Moog Voyager I might add.

Reason's new sequencer takes more than a little getting used to.

In summary: Good, but there are better sounding VSTi out there. I prefer the Pro-53 and ASynth, coupled with the freeware GSuite effects. Routing is good, but its beaten by things like Vaz Modular and Absynth. CPU is fair, but it needs to run at higher sample rates to make it sound good.

But, after all that, if anyone wants to buy Reason 4.0. I'm selling my copy for 150GBP including shipping to UK/EU.

Tony

www.oakleysound.com"