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Solaris has arrived!


Matocaster

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Wow! This was well worth the wait and I'm speechless. This is easily the best digital synth I've ever heard! This is just my opinion. Sound wise it is unmatched. The modulation routing is endless. Thanks John Bowen for creating a synth that has a vintage feel and futuristic sounds!!!
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Wow! This was well worth the wait and I'm speechless. This is easily the best digital synth I've ever heard! This is just my opinion. Sound wise it is unmatched. The modulation routing is endless. Thanks John Bowen for creating a synth that has a vintage feel and futuristic sounds!!!

 

Congrats !

It´s the best DSP technology inside you can buy.

Watching your pics, the white variant w/ the wooden endcaps looks amazingly good and all the user audio demos I listened to meanwhile sound terrific.

 

I hope we´ll see more user reports here next future.

 

A.C.

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The action feels great. I believe it has a Fatar keybed.

 

The presets sound awesome! There's a wide variety on board. John Bowen has a bank of presets that give you some classic Prophet 5, Minimoog, Oberheim, Prophet VS and Waldorf Microwave sounds. The most amazing thing is being able mix the oscillator and filter types of these synths to create entirely new sounds!

 

There are banks also done by Howard Scarr and 4 other programmers. They don't leave anything out. All very strong synth sounds to get you outta the gate. It's fun to start with a preset and using it as a springboard to create a new sound. However, it's also very easy to start from scratch with just square wave and go bananas with just a knob twist or two!

 

The number of modulation routing possibilities is endless. It's literally a Swiss Army knife synth that can utilize all of it's features at once if that's what you like. It's the new standard as far as hardware digital synths go. The 6 Sharc DSP processors are of the highest quality available and not in any other synth.

 

Considering that I'm a guitarist first, I'd have to agee with you Tonysounds!

 

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The action feels great. I believe it has a Fatar keybed.

 

Fatar TP-8 weighted,- that´s what the specs say.

I looked for the Fatar TP-8 variants and there´s the TP-8S ...

http://www.fatar.com/pages/TP_8S.htm

That´s what I think it is.

 

It seems to be a better keybed than the TP-9 in Kurz PC361.

Anyway, the TP-9 in the Kurz is also a good synth action already (for me).

 

The presets sound awesome! There's a wide variety on board. John Bowen has a bank of presets that give you some classic Prophet 5, Minimoog, Oberheim, Prophet VS and Waldorf Microwave sounds. The most amazing thing is being able mix the oscillator and filter types of these synths to create entirely new sounds!

 

I enjoyed all your vids posted and I´d wish you´re willing and have the time to post examples of some of the classic vintage synth patches.

 

The 6 Sharc DSP processors are of the highest quality available and not in any other synth.

 

AFAIK,- these newer 333MHz SHARC DSPs are also in the Access Virus TI2 (but only 2 of these) and you find these also on latest UAD cards and in S|C Xite-1D (4 333MHz DSPs + 6 60MHz ones) and S|C Xite-1 (12 + 6 older ones).

 

Talking about DSP power is talking about polyphony too.

I assume you have a early OS actually,- see here "estimated polyphony" in the FAQ.

http://www.johnbowen.com/solaris-faq.html

As soon as Solaris will get DSP offloading and MIDI multi mode in a update, it will become a more killer machine than it already is.

 

A.C.

 

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As soon as Solaris will get DSP offloading and MIDI multi mode in a update, it will become a more killer machine than it already is.

 

Pardon my ignorance, but what is DSP offloading?

 

:idk

When an eel hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a Moray.
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As soon as Solaris will get DSP offloading and MIDI multi mode in a update, it will become a more killer machine than it already is.

 

Pardon my ignorance, but what is DSP offloading?

 

:idk

 

1st, you´d have to know, J.B. Solaris is based on the experiences John Bowen has by coding his ZARG DSP plugins for the old Creamware (now Sonic Core) DSP platform.

J.B. did killer sounding DSP plugins for this platform in the past, so he decided to construct Solaris for this platform 1st as a DSP plugin which is also available for Scope card and S|C card and Xite-1D / Xite-1 users.

 

On the old Creamware cards, the user wasn´t able to decide and if he loaded a plugin, to which DSPs the plugin will be assigned to optimize the DSP usage for more plugins and/or voicecount.

With the new S|C Xite machines and SCOPE 5 SDK, that changed, but planning, designing and constructing Solaris hardware synth happened earlier than Scope 5 SDK was available.

 

With a S|C Xite-1 or D and SCOPE 5 software, now users are able to assign plugin load to single DSPs or combinations of these manually and to store that in a project, but it´s also not prefectly optimized up to now and Solaris is a different machine, even the technology is the same.

The difference is, Xite-1 machines use older and newer SHARC DSP together (the old ones do all the audio routing and are better for this purpose, Solaris hardware synth uses only the newer SHARCs and is no recording environment needing the complex audio routing.

That´s the background.

 

Solaris itself assigns "plugins" (there are also portions of former Zarg plugins running in Solaris which combine to a "engine" needed for a patch) automatically and depending on complexity of patches, but without DSP offloading, you have a static DSP load until you change a patch.

That can be optimized because after a patch is loaded and while you play, not all of the functionality of that patch might be active all the time.

I cannot explain better because I´m not a DSP tech or coder for this technology, but w/ DSP offload and depending on the patch played (or patches in upcoming MIDI multi mode) it will free some DSP power for more voices,- actually 10 w/ the machine full running and later 15-18 eventually.

 

The DSP offloadig will make a big difference if (4-part) MIDI multi mode will be implemented.

It explains it at best.

Imagine you load a multi patch for a performance, 2 monophonic and 2 8-voice polyphonic p.ex., but only play 2 of these at a time, it might be ideal the patches you don´t play at that time are just only loaded but don´t consumate DSP ressources until you play ´em.

For that, a routine called "DSP offloading" is necessary.

Just only one example, valid for FX also and eventually much more complex and going much deeper into the overall engine routines.

 

A.C.

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