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Poly-Ana is an authentic and powerful synth. It does have some drawbacks though; none that are deal-breaker. Poly-Ana has 185 different controls. That makes
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The most unique and powerful of Poly-Ana’s features is the two modmixers. Each mixer allows you to chain four of the 26 different modulation sources together in series and in parallel. This is what really makes this synth above and beyond. It is an extremely good sounding synth with good modulation. The mod-mixers let you create all sorts of complex modulation setups for the oscillator, filter, and amp sections. The modmixer brings in the element of surprise. The quality and variety of sounds you pull out of Poly-Ana is hard to do with many other synths. None of the other synths in my opinion have the same true analog sound quality that Poly-Ana has.
molding sounds very fun and interesting. With its gui though everything is all on one large control board. There are no pages to scroll through or hidden controls. This is of course good and bad. The modulation source knobs are big and a bit clustered together. To help with this it has the option to change the knobs to drop-downs menus to choose between sources. It is a noble idea to have everything right there in front of you, but there are alot of knobs, names, and controls packed onto it's gui. It is just a matter of opinion really, some may like that there is no scrolling and clicking to use the controls. I personally think however that a smaller more streamlined gui would be easier to navigate and be more practical. The only other real downside to Poly-Ana is the cpu use. Depending on how much you have going on in a patch it can drain your computer if you have the quality set very high. Since it's first release the developer has improved cpu use significantly. Admiral Quality's "brute-force method" of processing can be intesive. For the most part, if you have it set to the lowest sample-rate Poly-Ana is fine anyway for basic sounds. I believe
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Admiral Quality this synth is something you just do not find very often in the form of software. When you need a touch of old and classic in your music PolyAna is the tool you pull out of the kit. Creating interesting sounds is easy due to the way Poly-Ana is laid out.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ the cpu usage to be a prety fair trade-off for the sonic power it brings to my arsenal. It is a workhorse sort of synth that is capable of alot of great sounds. If the cpu usage were lower it would be the perfect workhorse.
If you are looking for a nice virtual analog synth that actually sounds real I would give the Poly-Ana demo a try. It gives you seven days of unrestricted use to try it out. It is a PC-only VSTI. The price tag is a modest $129.95. Anyone who loves analog synths will admire the sound quality of Poly-Ana; a truly convincing emulation. It is a synth I truly like and use frequently. The sound is dusty,vintage, and soulful. With the coming addition of an FX section on the synth Poly-Ana is quickly becoming a modern classic.
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WSM: Mike, could you give the readers a bit of background on yourself and what made you start the Admiral Quality company? AQ: I'm a forty-year-old software developer from Toronto. The name "Admiral Quality" was my stage name when I played keyboards and drums in a couple of unknown Toronto bands in the late 90s. But it seemed to fit my vision of the company too, how I was going to differentiate it from everything else out there. It's easy to remember (for some anyway) and it still makes me giggle. So it became the company name too. Most of my programming career has been spent working on graphics, multimedia and Web applications -nothing purely audio related. Music was always just a hobby to me, and while it was the original medium that drew me to using technology and computers in the first place, the multimedia career path I ended up on never treated audio as anything
by Paul Evans
Admiral Quality
more than an asset to plunk into some larger piece. I hadn't written any code to actually generate music since I was a teenager, programming my own "organs" and "synthesizers" on the first Atari and Texas Instruments home computers. This was fine with me, as it left
music to be the art form I pursued for my own enjoyment. Everything else, while related by computer science, I could look at as just a job and still find the energy to come home and work on music after a long day of programming for a multimedia sweatshop.
www.WusikSoundMagazine.com
October 2008
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