Some info:
brok landers wrote:hi fellas,
i think it's time for me to chime in here to clear up some stuff.
as maybe some of you know richard from synapse audio and me developed legend.
he did the coding (which was a tremendeous and very tedious effort), i brought the mini (in i must say _exellent_ condition - thanks, till!) and measured it via ear, waterfall diagrams, oscilloscopes and analysers and whatnot and tweaked the "rough cut" to as close as imo one can get. i also made the dry/wet demo comparsion files, which are posted on the propellerheads forum.
the minimoog, although not a very mojo-filled synth as one who only knows it from the myth behind it might think, is very tricky in quite some aspects, that, if you do not put weight on these aspects, lead to a sound that can never reproduce the behave of the minimoog.
the envelopes are complex beasts in terms of behaviour, they have a quite noticable amplitude-spike within the first milliseconds, which flattens as soon as the attack and the decay are raised (other fully analog synths show that behaviour, too). as you can imagine, _this_ makes the sound _very_ snappy. then there's some kind of dc-overflow in the filter env amount, which has the tendency to rise and add up from a lower point of the amount originally being set up with every keystroke, up until it reaches the full amount that has been set up. to get this behavoir right over the full range of the pots, we did sweat blood.
then there's, obviously the cascaded ladder filter which the minimoog is so famous for, which interacts with several filter-internal gainstages and dc-offsetfactors, of which the typical, characteristic drive behaviour comes from. the vca stage does the rest of the silky and round sound. also, the minimoog ladder, due to some kind of highpass in the feedback of the filter, is flat response at max resonance, down to around 150-100hz (depending on how carefully the original was maintained and serviced), then the resonance rapidly drops off into nirvana. this also is the reason, why the mini handles basses so well, as the resonance, as soon it reaches the first few harmonics of the osc, doesn't overlay these, as it drops away in level at below this frequency.
also the osc shapes _mandatorily_ have to be done perfect, otherwise the filter doesn't behave like in the original. the square and the two pulses were really hard and crucial, but the hardest was the triangle - because in the late versions of the model d (83/84) were _far_ away from a real triangle shape - strange enough the older versions were way closer to a triangle.
then the pink noise, which, when used for frequency/filter frequency modulation, is filtered down in the control path only to some kind of red noise, was also very crucial. if you want fm that sounds close to a minimoog, the osc behaviour as well as the red noise has to be quite acurately modelled, otherwise it will sound _nothing_ like a minimoog.
there' s plenty of stuff i could go on about, but you might understand what i am trying to say.
i myself owned three minis, one from 76 and two from the last ones in the 80s.
now as i was deeply involved in the development of legend i can tell you that up to now there is _no_ emulation of the minimoog coming so close as legend does - in all aspects. richard did a einstein-like job on this, sitting here in my studio day after day, programming like a maniac. but of course you don't have to believe me (of course you might think i'm biassed) - just listen to the dry comparsion wav files i did once they're on the synapse audio site, ready to be downloaded or get them from the link of the propellerheads forum (i believe someone posted the link to these here in this thread), if they're still there, and judge for yourself. and get the demo, once it is out and fiddle around with it.
i can only say, that legend sounds and behaves nearly identical to the minimoog we had here, and as i stated before, it was in excellent condition and well serviced.
the video demo which kevin made is a very nice one, but i can see some users wanting something completely different, when they have the sound of a minimoog in mind, so for them a rather contemporary edm/bigroom demo might be a red flag. but believe me - legend delivers.
so, to sum it up, if you are after the minimoog-sound/behave for your daw, legend is the closest to get there. while i know all minimoog emulations there are, and some of them are great synths in their own right, they fail when it comes to some of the above stated aspects, which make a great part of the minimoog sound (even monark fails f.e. deeply in the noise fm modulation). and on top of it legend offers quite some tweaking possibilities, that an original minimoog only gives you, if you open it and tweak the screwpots. and it's polyphonic - so _that_ is unique, as there obviously never was a polyphonic minimoog.
now there you have it.
Rich has lots of info too, i'll check if its ok to copy/paste from beta forum.
Enjoy
