Synth Engines criticism/debate

There’s quite a lack of multi-timbral synths these days. Calling three timbres in a five hundred Euro synth a limitation sounds a bit overbearing.

An iPad does not have the full Logic Pro but a significantly limited version.

And also, try to substitute a Waldorf Iridium with it. Won’t do.

Yeah, the competition in that price range with more parts is basically a Roland SH4d, a Waldorf Blofeld, or a used Elektron Digitone I or Korg Wavestate. Off all those, only the Sh4d can be compared to Synth in terms of sonic flexibility.

What’s the problem you see with that? An iPad is arguably more flexible than the Iridium, there’s so many capable synths (also granular) and effects available, and you can integrate those with Camelot, AUM or Audiobus into quite complex multitimbral setups that go above and beyond of what the Iridium can do, and you can save and recall these setups, too.

Modern iPads also have a lot of processing power. Even my old iPad Air 2 (from 2014) runs Quanta/iPulsaret/Borderlands etc. without any problems.

For the €2000 of an Iridium you can get a new iPad Pro M4 plus an audio interfaces plus apps and MIDI controller (Faderfox or whatever) that will give the Iridium a run for its money.

The problem I see imitating the Iridium on an iPad is the sheer number of tools you need to run at the same time. An iPad is not capable of running this number of plug-ins at the same time.

Really? What would be the limit that would prevent that? I haven’t maxed out mine in recent years, I typically use 5 or 6 plugins max. these days, but even with my old iPad Air 2 I was able to run 10-15 plugins, and even more FX in multitrack apps.

An iPad Air 5 has a geekbench rating of 2321 / 8484, that is better than a Macbook Pro 13" from 2020.. It also has 8 GB of RAM.

An iPad might be capable but why you did you choose the waldorf iridium as an example.
The core features alone are 3osc+6sub osc+2filter+6env+6lfo per voice and you have 16+duotimbral. Its essentially the engine of the quantum. The kernel for granular are nuts! These DSP are far better for this task than an iPad.

I’ve played one recently, a friend of mine has one in his studio. Its a beast.

That feeling when you have an Iridium Core and it’s just gathering dust on the shelf :see_no_evil_monkey:
But I agree, it’s a granular synthesis beast, you can feed it a huge number of samples, engines, effects, and it’ll never even hint to you that it has CPU issues.

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I actually like the way the synths sound. The filters are so characterful. WIsh the Digitone had filters like these. But yeah, the three patches per project limitation makes me sad. Patches cannot be locked to steps and even to patterns. Parameters aren’t p-lockable either. The macro system is really hard to use. I also don’t like linear behaviour of LFOs and macros. The patch editing UI is awful. I don’t enjoy patching at all.