John Bowen Synth Design

matocaster wrote:good luck finding any digital synth or va with specs this powerful

specs quoted in terms of osc, filters, etc. are at least something i can understand. it was on the basis of those specs, plus the knob-laden interface plus the sound i heard on john's demos that convinced me to step up, sign up, & become a preorder customer. so i'm already sold! it was things like having 4 osc, the absolutely unique rotors, the filter resonance, the feedback capability, & all those modulation options that i could not resist.

my question about the digital specs comes from the fact that i'm an analogue geezer from pre-MIDI days, and i'm just now trying to rise from the dead & get back into electronic music making. solaris will be my first digital synth, ever. have never even tried a va or vst before. i never understood what bothered me when i listened to demos of things like the virus or roland's pseudo-junos, or vsts. well, i still don't, to be truthful. something seems to be missing. they sound a little flat (as in 2 dimensional) maybe more like a picture of a sound.

for reasons i also don't understand, the solaris sounds different, more real & alive, like an analogue synth, but different of course. and i'm just trying to understand what is that makes the solaris different. i suspect it's due to a number of things such as the internal processing rate, details of the mystical code, the D/A conversion, & who knows what else. i'm sure the 24/96 processing rate is an important piece in this.

i suspect this is why other companies don't quote bit rate/freq specs on their machines. but does anyone know?

whoops. as a point of order, i had picked up on the 24/96 processing from another discussion thread. but just noticed this on the solaris page:

Internally, all operations are 32-bit floating point and audio signals and busses run at 96 kHz for pristine audio quality.

Congrats on your pre-order 3rdConstruction. I use a mixture of analog and digital synths myself. The Solaris is the digital synth we've been waiting for. It has a great interface. It makes you want to turn knobs and touch the synth. It has the sound. Whether digital or analog is your thing, the Solaris has it all and will be able to add more synth features in the future.

So for someone like you who only knows analog synths, this will be very at home in your hands, but will also be the best introduction into digital synths. It has the power and flexibility of vst, with sonic character and hands on capability of classic analog synths.