Product: IK Multimedia Sonik Synth 1
Price Paid: US >$200
Submitted
08/02/2005
at
09:28pm
by
John Burdick
Email: jnb17 at aol<dot>com
Reviewer Background
:
I'm a veteran guitarist/composer type with a fair amount of experience with synths, softsynths and sample libraries.
While I'm reluctant to try and describe my music, I will say that it definitely does not fall in the electronic genres, even
though I use and program synths. Nor I am much interested anymore in the best that emulative sampling has to offer,
though I would like one of the new high end orchestral libraries (Sonic Synth is NOT that)
I use Sonc Synth within the included SampleTank LE in Sonar Producer Edition 4. I've had it for going on a year now. I
use a Delta 1010 and monitor on Tannoy Reveals (passive).
Ease of Use
:
No Opinion
Sounds/Sound Quality
:
No Opinion
Overall Rating
:
8
I got Sonic Synth and a bunch of bonus disks through the increasingly popular "group buy" kindof deal. I forget the
closing price for the whole package--somewhere in the 120s I think--but it was a ludicrous amount of samples for the
price. Value was simply off the charts. The occasion of the group buy was the release of Sonic Synth 2. I don;t hink you
can get SS 1 anymore.
Overall, it's a bit of a niche-filler for me. Redundant with many of my hardies and softies. Covers a lot of "GM" territory,
but does so with a whacky, quirky sensibility. There are some rough edges and inconsistencies, some odd sound
selctions, but that's part of the charm. I'm not going to break it down by sound type, but I will say that acoustic pianos are
blah, but the drums are very good, and I like the alternative mapping they use for the drum sets--very playable and not so
different from standard mapping as to require retraining of one's little drummer fingers.
These are not breathtakingly expressive, 16-velocity layer 500MB samples. These are more akin to what you'd find on
your late Yamaha or Korg or Alesis or Kurzweil ROMpler, and certainly of comparable sound quality.
The most obvious point of comparison, however, would be the SampleTank XL library. Neither are exquisite,
extravagantly large samples like one might buy for GigaStudio. SampleTank XL samples are on the whole more polished
and processed sounding; Sonic Synth is a little more lively an unpredictable. I consider that a good thing.
