So I finally caved in..

[Timo]

.. and received a parcel while I was away. A new brother for my Indigo 1, finally joining the TI ranks with the rest of you.



Sounds really great layered with the Indigo. Full on multimode! Also made me realise what the Virus C patches should have sounded like, rather than having them shoe-horned into the virus B Indigo engine.

Moog 1-pole destroys all my old sounds (in a really good way), it's so responsive and smooth, almost like a Screamer fuzz box at extreme settings. Love the new extended distortion models too (separate to the stomp-box distortions) - that was a surprise for me as I'd never read about them. Hypersaw sounds great, not too keen on the Wavetables yet. A nice polyphony boost over the Indigo.

Awesome thing I found with the Indigo is that all the knobs can control the same parameters on the Snow, so it's like having a Polar of sorts.

[boreg]

Congrats Timo!

[TweakHead]

nice! feel free to share further thoughts on the TI with us!

how did the TI worked for you? since you haven't mentioned it, must have been a smooth ride, uh?

[oscillator]

Nice purchase!

I have a Virus C, let me know what I'm missing...

[Berni]

I can just see access announcing the new TI3 next week, Lol. Welcome to the TI world Timo.

[TweakHead]

^yeah, rumor has it that development would start immediately after some unit was sold to Timo - they simply couldn't find the motivation without meeting this goal first XD

[MBTC]

Congrats on the acquisition! Having both the Snow and Indigo would also put you in the unique position to comment on the age old question about whether the old B and C series sound better (or different) than the TI (as I know very few people who have both) or post some A/B examples assuming they are forward compatible with regard to patches?

[TweakHead]

^indeed, but something tells me he's found better things to do with his time, then forum lurking lately - isn't it so Timo? hope you have a good time with the new machine, and also feel you're the guy to do such tests and report back. maybe you can sell a couple more units to folks round here eheh

[Timo]

Ty. Been away a fair amount, interspliced with OS problems.

Originally Posted by TweakHead

^yeah, rumor has it that development would start immediately after some unit was sold to Timo - they simply couldn't find the motivation without meeting this goal first XD

Hhoho, my master plan has been leaked!

Truth is, been itching for them to release a new synth for some time now (c'mon Access, wake up!). Acquired the Snow for a good price second hand until (if) such another synth is released. Was really eager to gain access to the Virus C and TI sound engine features and the Snow seemed a good entry point to take such a bite while retaining most of its value. Like the flavour of the whole pig, but in a little sausage.

As I primarily got it to tap into the sound engine and that I've always been a hands-on player and tweaker, I'm not used to the TI element and requiring to disappear into the box so heavily. Feels a little elusive and less fluid at times, but thankfully the Indigo sends every knob, button press and menu edit to the Snow, so pretty much all of the 'classic' parameters are editable from the Indigo which helps a great deal, for example when tweaking the oscillator tuning parameters, filter/amp ADSR envelopes, LFOs, etc.. The editing structure from the Snow's panel itself is becoming more intuitive with time though.

The sound quality is absolutely top notch. Maybe it's the threads I've read in the past on the forums here but I was half expecting the TI to sound slightly different, possibly thinner than the Indigo. However I've been doing a little demoing the Indigo and Snow side by side, exporting or reproducing patches using only features that the Indigo has, and from what I've done so far and as long as volumes are matched I cannot tell between the two, they sound otherwise identical. I followed the C vs TI audio quality thread, and recently revisited it, and will definitely be probing more into it in the future.

Has to be noted that I am using the (24bit) analog outs on the Snow (going into my Motu) rather than the audio over USB (16-bit 44.1KHz).

The Indigo can sometimes sound a little blunt when you then go on to use the extra features of the TI to refine the same sound(s) further, such as the EQ and extra mod slots, but in many cases it can still hold its own perfectly well too. Hard to believe the B series is nearly 15 years old now.

Originally Posted by oscillator

I have a Virus C, let me know what I'm missing...

Many of the features I'm enjoying most are actually from the C, since I never had them - namely the Moog filters (super!), the extra EQ, and the extra matrix slots (although the TI matrix is expanded even moreso) - the added slots is a huge boon as, although I did learn many workarounds with the Indigo before getting the TI, I felt that was one area I was slightly hampered with the Indigo. The extra slots allow you to be a lot more expressive.

The TI's Hypersaw is good fun, although I've been digging so much out of the Indigo over the years, squeezing the most out of it, I found I had already been imitating something akin to it with the Indigo (using a little trickery), getting around 80-90% of the way there. The hypersaw from the TI adds that final 10-20%. In some aspects I prefer the classic saw mimicking a hypersaw over the actual hypersaw itself, and sometimes vice versa. The triggering of the waveforms do actually work slightly differently from each other (I'll explain this in another thread shortly). However it's nice having the option of both.

The Wavetables have really grown on me, some really nice ones in there, a vast extension to the standard 64 PCM waveforms. Using really slow LFOs to modulate the index also gives out some fab sounding, ever-changing ambient swells too. If I had to be picky, I find they can have a tendency to sound FM, glassy/bell or organ-like, similar to the original stock of 64 PCMs. I think this may be because the waveforms are algorithmically generated, rather than real PCMs? Would have been nice to have see some real, sampled PCMs in there too - like loads of different saw waveforms, or variations on classic oscillators. Unsure how Zeta2+ manages to create their waveforms so flexibly without the bell-like audio quality, but it would be nice to have that on the Virus in a future incarnation.

The additional effects add a whole new wealth of exploration, you can really go mad with them, especially those in the filterbank (freq shifter, comb [awesome!], vowel filter, et al), a dream for sound bending. The new choruses and distortions are great too. Also really glad they made a new, additional Rate-Reducer distortion - the old one is still there too, but the classic rate-reducer was (in my opinion) far too aggressive and quick acting (anything above 10 started to get painful) rendering it largely unusable. The new appended one seems much more musical.

Tape-echo's nice. Not quite as aggressive as the one in the Radias, it's more mellow and controlled. I think even greater sonic results could be achieved if it were possible to route the distortion effect module after the tape delay for some really crazy saturation effects, especially considering the variety of distortion types available in the distortion module. A future suggestion for Access perhaps? I know delay and reverb are usually placed at the end of the sound chain, and all that. There may well be a way to re-route the output to audio-input internally in some way to achieve this though, early days for me, so much to play with.

Absolutely blown away with the diversity and number of quality patches out there for the TI. Even if you were just a preset jockey it'd keep you occupied for eons. For the rest of us, considerably longer. Have yet to dig into other aspects like the Graintables thus far.

One thing I would like, though, is to be able to simply load up the software in some sort of standalone mode for jamming, sound design, etc. - akin to the old Emagic Sound Diver - without having to load your DAW sequencer and load the Snow VST into it, etc.. Currently using the Savihost wrapper method as a workaround when not using a sequencer.

how did the TI worked for you? since you haven't mentioned it, must have been a smooth ride, uh?

To be honest, god awful, but it's my computer rather than the Snow. Recently migrated my PC OS from Vista to Win 8.1, as well as upgrading the mobo BIOS and wish I hadn't. Where I used to get down to 6ms in Vista and 1.5ms in XP, in Win8 all my VSTs (Amplitube, etc.) are completely out of sync.

Done a bit of digging and found the interrupt procedure calls are going wappy. Had a similar problem with Vista (although it was still usable), but Win8 has amplified it in orders of magnitude.



Installed Win8.1 clean on another partition yesterday to try to track down the problem but the DPC issues were there without installing anything other than the OS and hardware drivers. As my mobo is 6 years old now it doesn't have Win8 drivers so used Win7 ones - unsure if this is what's causing the problem. Either way I can't get less than 500ms latency out of Amplitube 3 or the Snow when jamming live.

Re-installed Windows XP dual boot on the same computer and the DPC latencies dropped right down, so it's either the legacy computer hardware drivers causing the probs in Win8 (most likely) or the Win8 OS itself (less likely, as no-one else has complained).



However I found out the hard way that, when setting up a dual boot system, you cannot simply install an older OS after a new OS, as the old OSs overwrite the bootblock with data that doesn't and cannot recognise the newer OSs, so I was completely locked out of my main Win8.1 OS. Had to do a backup restore to restore it, but now I'm locked out of XP instead. Ho hum. Looks like I may have to format both OSs and install them sequentially, but I really can't stomach going back to XP just for the Snow. It's an aging OS and the version I own is 32-bit so can't use any 64-bit software and hardware on it, and Access has also dropped XP support in the latest versions of TI OS.

Already been looking to build a new computer given it's 6 years old, so this may give me the shove I need.

Back to the Snow, overall extremely impressed with the sound engine for such a little beast. Just miffed my computer isn't up to dealing with audio more effectively at present.

[TweakHead]

Just keep on going Timo! You live up to expectations!

I think I may get the sausage myself if Access takes long to deliver a new product - same frame of mind! Yeah, but the extra features on the engine are also growing and growing on me XD

Sad thing you're having trouble with your pc. You're not alone. All is not well on the mac side either, I've been shocked to see how much performance gets lost moving away from Snow Leopard to any of the most recent ones. Not kidding. It seems to be improving with the updates though, but it's been ages since I had to do some serious testing before deciding how to set up my rig. Narrowed it down to: snow leopard on the imac, mavericks on the mbp.