SuperNatural Acoustic

anotherscott2022 wrote:

Lazerlike42 wrote:

they have heavily pushed the SN engines in their marketing for the Fantoms as though this is still their top of the line sound engine

I don't see it that way. Remember, when the Fantom first came out it had no SuperNATURAL sounds whatsoever, and none were mentioned as forthcoming. So it was not initially marketed as SN at all, that's all been added later (along with lots of other stuff). The first were the strings and brass that came in update 1.5, then the first piano/EP in 1.6, and then a downloadable second piano was added earlier this year.

No, for the Fantom they didn't market it this way, but for the Fantom-0 it's been a major point of emphasis. My point here is simply that all evidence is that they're not abandoning their SuperNatural technology/branding/concept but are continuing to treat it as one of their premier technologies.

[qupte] For an extreme example of this, the predecessor to the VTW organ was the SuperNATURAL tonewheel organ, which probably has about zero programming in common with the SuperNATURAL piano or whatever.[/quote]

I'm not sure if this is quite correct. They ha VTW organs on older products like the RDNX and RD800 series. I think they predated SN organs by many years. It seems they tried SN organs in the FA but found them inferior to their older VTW technology and reverted on the Fantom.

There is actually evidence of this if you look at the update history, which also list the bugs that they fix along the way. Some bugs only affected SN instruments, or even only a specific one. This further supports the idea that these SN implementations are programmatically distinct and separate from non-SN sounds and from each other. e.g.:

1.51 - "When using Master Key Shift, the pitch of SuperNATURAL Acoustic sounds fails to be set correctly."
3.00 - "The timing of sound production for SN-A tones is sometimes irregular."
3.00 - "With SN-A tones, tones in the E.BASS category cannot be muted smoothly."

I agree that this is plausible and I certainly hope you're right. On the other hand, it does make a purchasing decision more difficult right now because on the one hand if I knew Roland were going to continue to add SN tones to the Fantom series it would be a major mark in its favor - and it does seem like a reasonable hope that they will! - but at the same time I don't think it's a good idea to make such a large purchase based on hope or expectation. For example, I had made an even more expensive camera purchase in part owing to very wide expectation that a significant firmware update was going to be coming soon and to this point it's not ever come. It seemed like a very reasonable expectation at the time based on the evidence, but it is an expensive expectation unfulfilled.

anotherscott2022 wrote:

Lazerlike42 wrote:

At least in my case, I really want to go the Roland route because I love what they're put together in terms of hardware, but the sounds that are included are just miles behind the competition as far as I can hear.

It really depends on the sounds. (And of course, it's also somewhat subjective.) When it comes to straight PCM sampled instruments, the Yamaha architecture does have a technical advantage, in supporting many more available sonic components per sound (Yamaha calls them Elements, Roland calls them Partials), and Yamaha has the FM engine which, naturally, gives it better FM sounds. OTOH, Roland has the technical advantage in virtual analog synthesis, tonewheel organ emulation, and in the modeling capabilities of the SuperNATURAL Acoustic tones.

But I'd also suggest that sounds may not be the most important differentiator. You can always add sounds. Both the MODX and Fantom-0 are excellent at letting you incorporate, for example, sounds from an iPad into your sound combinations about as easily as if they were built-in sounds, and that's a way to get a wider range of high quality orchestral instruments into your Roland, or a way to get VA synthesis or a tonewheel organ engine into your MODX. So if both instruments at least had "good enough" built in sounds for the bulk of your work, you could make the argument that it is the differences in features, workflow, ergonomics, action, etc. that are more important.

Yes, it's true that one can add sounds. The truth is that in a certain sense, I have very little need of the sounds. I have VSTs which in the majority of categories will give much better sounds than any hardware that exists can.

At the same time, if not for the sounds why have one of these sorts of products at all, and not just instead get a dedicated MIDI controller for half the price or less? I think the only real answer is that there are reasons for having hardware with built in sounds and which software won't as easily fulfill, even if the software would in a vacuum sound better. For some people it's about reliability or the difficulties involved with trying to bring a system powerful enough to support many VSTs to different locations. For me, one of the big things hardware provides is immediacy. Yes, I can always supplement or even replace the sounds in hardware with software, but at least as I see it in doing so I would fail to gain one of the major elements I'm looking to get by adding a new board on, and lose most of the value that makes the board itself unique and worth owning over other options in the first place.

Lazerlike42 wrote:

I'm not sure if this is quite correct. They ha VTW organs on older products like the RDNX and RD800 series. I think they predated SN organs by many years. It seems they tried SN organs in the FA but found them inferior to their older VTW technology and reverted on the Fantom.

RDNX/RD800 didn't use the VTW nomenclature for their tonewheel organ modeling, they called it "TW-Organ." In their VK8, VR760, and VR700, they called the engine a "Virtual Tonewheel Sound Generator" which is closer, but they still weren't calling it VTW, that seems to be newer terminology. They've had a bunch of names for their various modeled tonewheel organ implementations!

Again, I think SuperNATURAL is an umbrella term that encompasses numerous technologies... what SN instruments have in common is simply that they involve modeling. But as VTW and V-Piano the Fantom's VA expansions demonstrate, Roland can also employ modeling and not call something SuperNATURAL. I think whether a particular modeled instrument is or is not called SuperNATURAL is probably a marketing decision more than anything else. That being the case, as I said, I can see each "translation" of a SuperNATURAL instrument to a new platform being something of a unique scenario, since, for example, modeling an organ (whether called SuperNATURAL or not) involves very different programming and algorithms than modeling certain aspects of a piano, or those of a violin.

Lazerlike42 wrote:

At the same time, if not for the sounds why have one of these sorts of products at all, and not just instead get a dedicated MIDI controller for half the price or less? I think the only real answer is that there are reasons for having hardware with built in sounds and which software won't as easily fulfill, even if the software would in a vacuum sound better. For some people it's about reliability or the difficulties involved with trying to bring a system powerful enough to support many VSTs to different locations. For me, one of the big things hardware provides is immediacy. Yes, I can always supplement or even replace the sounds in hardware with software, but at least as I see it in doing so I would fail to gain one of the major elements I'm looking to get by adding a new board on, and lose most of the value that makes the board itself unique and worth owning over other options in the first place.

I agree with most of that, but also, I think the reason to not "get a dedicated MIDI controller for half the price or less" is that the dedicated MIDI controllers aren't always as good, even as nothing but controllers. I think the full Fantom might be the best MIDI controller you can get today. Arguably, they could make one with no sounds in it, and just sell it as a top-quality controller. But how much cheaper would it be, and how much market is there for a controller-only at that price? The Fantom-0, similarly, is arguably a better controller than anything you could buy for less than the price of a Fantom-0, at least except for the variable of action/aftertouch. But if they came out with a Fantom-0 with no sounds for a few hundred less, I wonder how that would sell, if people could also get all the sounds for a few hundred more. Regardless of whether you like this sound or that one more or less than the equivalent in a Yamaha or whatever, there are still lots of really nice sounds in the Roland. And a nice interface for editing them, etc.

anotherscott2022 wrote:

Lazerlike42 wrote:

I'm not sure if this is quite correct. They ha VTW organs on older products like the RDNX and RD800 series. I think they predated SN organs by many years. It seems they tried SN organs in the FA but found them inferior to their older VTW technology and reverted on the Fantom.

RDNX/RD800 didn't use the VTW nomenclature for their tonewheel organ modeling, they called it "TW-Organ." In their VK8, VR760, and VR700, they called the engine a "Virtual Tonewheel Sound Generator" which is closer, but they still weren't calling it VTW, that seems to be newer terminology. They've had a bunch of names for their various modeled tonewheel organ implementations!

Hmmm, on Roland's website pages for the NX and 800, they list Virtual Tone Wheel Organ as one of the sound generators. I also checked the manuals and both the manual for the 700NX and the 800 call it Virtual Tone Wheel Organ.

Lazerlike42 wrote:

anotherscott2022 wrote:

RDNX/RD800 didn't use the VTW nomenclature for their tonewheel organ modeling, they called it "TW-Organ." In their VK8, VR760, and VR700, they called the engine a "Virtual Tonewheel Sound Generator" which is closer, but they still weren't calling it VTW, that seems to be newer terminology. They've had a bunch of names for their various modeled tonewheel organ implementations!

Hmmm, on Roland's website pages for the NX and 800, they list Virtual Tone Wheel Organ as one of the sound generators. I also checked the manuals and both the manual for the 700NX and the 800 call it Virtual Tone Wheel Organ.

Ah, I see they used both. And the FA (SuperNATURAL) organ is also referred to in the manual as TW Organ! Regardless, none of these models used the VTW acronym.

Again, I think the application of the "SuperNATURAL" moniker is a marketing decision, there's nothing inherent to one tonewheel model vs. another that appears to "qualify" it for that name or not. More to your point, I don't see a "back and forth" between the RD and FA approaches here (i.e. "reverting" from the FA SuperNATURAL to the earlier RD tonewheel emulation for the new Fantom implementation). Based on the docs, i.e. the differences in the features and settings available, it looks like the FA implementation was a step up from the RD800/RD2000 implementation (adding key click, leakage, and percussion recharge parameters), and the Fantom implementation is a step up from that (includes all the FA enhancements over the RD, but with 4 basic tonewheel types instead of 1, and also adding the chorus/vibrato that was so noted for its absence in the FA). The Fantom also adds a lot more in the way of overdrive options/controls. I'm not sure whether to consider that an organ difference or a rotary difference. But that brings me to...

The rotary differences are also interesting. The RD had one rotary effect, which had built-in overdrive. The FA again improved on the RD, by having three selectable rotary effects: its standard one, one with additional EQ that mimicked their earlier VK7, and the RD one with the built-in overdrive. (Building in the overdrive was very significant here, because you couldn't select two effects, which means that choosing the rotary with the built-in overdrive was the only way you could actually get those two effects simultaneously.) Again, the Fantom is a further step up in the rotary options for organ. From what I can tell, it appears to have the FA standard and VK7 versions implemented as standard effects (meaning you can put any Fantom sound through them, just as you could put any FA sound through them), but in this case, the third rotary is specific to the organ engine alone, and while it is similar to the third FA rotary by allowing you to have overdrive and rotary simultaneously, the overdrive has its own variety of types and settings, instead of simply being the one overdrive that was baked into the FA/RD rotary effect. Since the C/V and overdrive limitations were some of the most notable shortcomings of the FA and RD, it's good to see them addressed.