Spectrasonics Omnisphere Our First Impressions

Well as quoted by the team at Spectrasonics, this flagship plugin has been a long time in the making, but does the synth live up to all the hype?

Signal to Noise snapped up a copy of the “Power Synth” the second the box hit Australian shelves, and our first impression was 10/10. Synthesis has certainly come along way since the days of the “Moog” and with each advancement in the industry you can usually expect some cool new features and a bunch of interesting presets to keep the retail stores selling a constant amount of the latest software, so I was interested to see if Omnisphere was my new “goto synth”.

After my initial studio time using the plugin I decided to dig deeper and find Omnisphere’s limits, but after spending hours watching all the tutorials and creating my own patches I soon realised that the combination of an extremely large sample bank and an intelligent synthesis engine “Steam” provided virtually unlimited sonic possibilities. Let me explain.

Creating your own sounds from scratch is always easier said than done, and in my experience 80% of people are lazy and only use slightly tweaked patches. So everyone wants to buy the solution of getting amazing unique sound into their own productions. I have been using Omnisphere for about 2 months now and I’m still as excited to use the plugin as the day I first loaded it. Brand new approach to routing and interfacing has finally given birth to a plugin that allows your sounds to make the perfect transition from your mind to your speakers, it’s just so practical and easy to use.

Eric Persing was right when he said.

Users can go deeper and deeper into the software and progress in their synthesis knowledge by simply exploring additional levels of sound manipulation options.

This is just so true, as Omnisphere allows you to control every aspect of your oscillators, envelopes, filters, modulation, effects and much more in an easy to understand way. I think Omnisphere is going to be very successful for two reasons.

  1. Massive array of sound sources and an extremely powerful & flexible synthesis engine.
  2. Intuitive GUI and routing capabilities allows users of all levels to create unique and complex sounds.

I have heard comments online stating that Omnisphere is only limited to atmospheric sounds and effects, however this couldn’t be further from the truth. Atmospheric sounds are extremely complex and to sound rich and convincing the synthesizer must able to perform complex algorithms combined with feature heavy routing capabilties.

SIGNAL TO NOISE AWARDS OMNISPHERE 9/10 OVERALL

PROS

  • Massive sample content.
  • New ground breaking synthesis engine “Steam” gives new meaning to quality sound.
  • Easy to use GUI.
  • “Groove lock” technology allowing users to synchronize Omnisphere to Stylus RMX.
  • Advanced routing capabilities
  • Excellent video tutorials for registered users.
CONS
  • Heavy system requirements.
  • Midi learn bugs.
Spectrasonics Omnisphere is worth every cent and will add depth and life to your tracks.
Hyphen.