smeet wrote:
>
> Wow, those test graphs are pretty amazing. Although, I REALLY
> have a hard time believing that both of Reason's transpose that
> much better than EXS24, Halion, and Kontakt.
>
> I am on a Mac so I can't try it out. What is the subjective difference
> when comparing EXS24 and the sfz sampler?
The lack of aliasing at the higher quality levels makes things gernally clearer
and warmer to my ears. One interesting thing I find is that my favorite
electric bass samples sound brighter and punchier with the EXS24 -- I think the
treble artifacts put more grit in the sound - a bit like an exciter perhaps.
If you are A/B ing the two, the differences on a lot of samples eg percussion,
will be difficult to pick and of course you need to match the levels as
precisely as possible.
Brass samples show up the differences pretty dramatically. I have been testing
with a French Horn soundfont and the difference is night and day between EXS24
(best quality) and sfz (uber ++) in the adjacent channel with the same font
loaded.
Here are my impressions testing with a single french horn patch.
Playing single notes:
The exs24 version is much buzzier -- sounds a bit like some clipping distortion
but the channel output is at -10. By contrast, the sfz version sounds more like
the pure instrument tone and the lower frequencies are masked to a lesser
degree by the higher freqencies.
Playing a triad:
The amount of extra "fuzziness" with the EXS24 compared to the sfz is very
obvious.
I would be interested to hear some other opinions on the sfz.
Obviously the developers at Emagic could offer high quality modes for the EXS24
-- great for freezing/rendering.
I suspect that the reason they don't is not because the high quality algorithms
are hard to come by -- they have been published from what I gather from KVR
discussions involving softsampler developers -- but because Emagic don't want
to complicate the picture for newbie consumers who might select highest quality
and find they can't get enough voices. These sorts of considerations definitely
come into marketing calculations unfortunately. Does getting up on the stump
and boasting about 1000 sampler voices ring any bells ...
Regards,
Murray
