PSYN II or Pentagon I?

Hi there.

As a hardware "aficionado", or a freak if you like, I don't really want to spend a lot of cash buying a VST synth as I've a good hardware rig set-up which serves most of my needs.

However, I do use mostly VSTs for drums now or I sample my synth drum sounds into the SD3 for easy replay.

Therefore, I'd now like to use a good VST synth for white noise effects and have been comparing PSYN II and Pentagon I with the Superwave P8 as that's got a really easy GUI and similar to my Roland JP which I'm very used to!

I wasn't too impressed with the P8s white noise, especially when using the filter with resonance as I noticed some artefacts and it's definitely not as smooth sounding as the PSYN II.  Maybe because the P8 is made using the Synth Edit package (I'm not against that) but when I compared it with another free VST based on Synth Edit, it was almost the same!

I've also tried Pentagon I but that seems very processor hungry for what it's doing.

Therefore, has anyone got any good recommendations of any other free or low cost VST synths or would I be better sticking to one of the bundled VSTs in Sonar?

I know someone is going to say Sylenth 2 and yes, that's excellent but I'm not paying all that money for a synth VST at the current time.  I've also found the Z3ta synth GUI quite difficult so I'm not keen on using that unless someone thinks I'm really missing out.

Cheer guys for any advice.

Thanks Rain.

The Korg Legacy Collection does indeed look excellent but for what I need, I believe you've answered my question as Cakewalk do the Triangle II which is a Mono synth and indeed as you suggest, it does have a noise generator.

It's one of the RGC Audio synths so the quality should be really good and as it has less oscillators, polyphony and features compared to the Pentagon I, it should have a smaller CPU overheard!

It can be had here with another Cakewalk synth, the Square I:

http://www.cakewalk.com/products/triangle/default.aspx

http://www.cakewalk.com/products/squareI/default.aspx

The best news of all is that they're both free!

I've noted that Cakewalk do some other low cost synths on their online store so no need to look elsewhere unless you're looking for something specific.

More reasons to be a Sonar user - well done Cakewalk! 

Thanks Robert, another great find - I'll give that one a go to as it looks interesting.

One thing though, having now downloaded Triangle II, I noted that it comes as both, a DXi and VSTi and also as a standalone program.

Does anyone know if you can get Pentagon I like that too as the one bundled in Sonar only comes as a DXi plug-in?

I have to say that after having turned my nose up at both these, how wrong I was because Pentagon even allows you to add your own waveforms and chain them together like a proper wavetable synth.  It's also anti-aliasing and the Triangle II is a mono-synth gem!!!  Once you've used them a bit, they are actually straight forward to use as the beauty is that there are NO hidden menus or controls.

It's a shame that in the European EDM world, a lot of producers turn their nose up at these and say you need Sylenth, Native's Massive, a Virus Ti, blah blah blah!!!  Well, apart from the lack of Super/Hypersaw, for other sounds, from what I can hear, the Pentagon I is warm and lush.

If I've the time, I may do a comparison between a Sylenth, my JP, a Novation, my Matrix, the MKS and the Pentagon, stick the results on Soundcloud and see who can tell which is which!

That'll be the real acid test...

scook, I have both a P1DXi.dll and a Pentagon I.dll in my Shared DXi folder.

I also thought that X2 64-bit didn't support DXi ?


RickJP909 : "Once you've used them a bit, they are actually straight forward to use as the beauty is that there are NO hidden menus or controls."

I wouldn't say there aren't any hidden menus as I just spent a while trying to locate certain things that I was finally helped in another thread to find 'under' the Triangle or Pentagon logo :-)

Thanks scook, I see what you mean, only DXi Pentagon I shows in the plugin manager.

However, going from this, I just moved the PentagonI.dll (in the shared dxi folder) to a new directory I created in Vstplugins and now I have a second Pentagon I that shows up in plugin manager as a VST instrument.

So it appears that I (and everyone else or is this maybe X2 Producer specific ?) has both but only the DXi version is loaded by default ?

Ok, so that wasn't a good idea. My X2 just hangs and I have to kill it.

So the Pentagon I.dll is the DXi plugin. And the P1DXi.dll is then ?

This hasn't been a good evening for me. I've intruded into two threads and only contributed confusion.
I'm off to bed.

Hi Paul & Scook.

Thanks for your input and Paul, your comment was quite funny.  I'm glad you tried to load the other DLL though as I saw that too but didn't want to crash my Sonar so I tried it with VSTHost and it wouldn't load!  So I figured that it was only the DXi version.

Just in case you don't know already, have a look at this FREE VST Host software as I use it all the time for testing new VSTs, especially the free ones to make sure they run okay and for quickness to make sure it has what I want:

http://www.hermannseib.com/english/vsthost.htm

He also does a VST wrapper which works really well for testing and running any VSTi as a standalone instrument:

http://www.hermannseib.com/english/savihost.htm

I did see on another forum post that the version in the shop has the VSTi included but I was also wondering if it had a standalone wrapper included as the Triangle II contains all three!

I don't see as registered owners of Sonar, why we shouldn't be entitled to having all the versions for free so I've now sent an e-mail to customer services.

I'll also try clicking on the logos Paul as I wasn't aware that there was something hiding as I tried clicking in various places on the VSTs already!

Cheers guys . . .