Product Reviews by KVR Members

"It has the same expressive and crisp sound as Tunefish". Unfortunately, I have to disagree. I have just tried the 64-bit version of Sprike in Reaper, and some of the presets include unpleasant crackling sounds, which I don't hear when I use Tunefish 4. This is disappointing. It seems that Cognitone has some extra work to do on this VSTi.

LAGRANGE: A NOVEL GRAIN-BASED DELAY THAT DOESN'T GET BORING

Wow! I've been experimenting with all kinds of analog and digital delays for decennia, but after a while I tend to get bored with the sheer repetitiveness of them. However, I've been playing with Lagrange for several days now, and I just can't get enough of it. It's superb, precisely because it can be set up to be as predictable as a conventional delay if you want to get stuck in your own sweet groove, but also quite unpredictable if you need to ride tandem with the random.

It's relatively easy to understand Lagrange's basic operating principle if grains are familiar to you, if you heed the clearly written tool tips and if you first read Bryan Lake's excellent explanatory review on Bedroom Producers Blog: http://bedroomproducersblog.com/2016/12/01/ursa-dsp-lagrange/.

I'm sending the signal from my amazing Lost Volts LV-3 theremin (http://www.lostvolts.com/) through Lagrange, and with the feedback cranked up to around 8.5 and high Variable Delay in the order of 500 ms, I'm getting beautiful spacey bell-like resonances that go on reverberating forever, endlessly varying in surprising and highly musical ways due to randomization of the grains' delay times. The five grain-production algorithms produce strikingly different and satisfying results. As resonances can easily escalate and get completely out of control with high-feedback delays, it's convenient that there are three limiters to protect your delicate eardrums and valuable speaker cones: a peak limiter, an RMS limiter and a 'side-chain' limiter, the last of which doesn't actually respond to a side-chain input but to the amplitude envelope of the dry input signal, so that when the input signal peaks the wet output signal ducks. A nice touch is that when a limiter is doing its job, a ring around the relevant limiter's knob glows red. Additionally, in the feedback loop there is peak EQ of variable frequency and bandwidth, which enables you to cut an undesirably resonating frequency band by as much as -24 dB.

This has become my favourite VST FX plugin. I love it. Congratulations to Lagrange's creator, Dave Elton of Enginehouse Studios (http://enginehousestudios.com/), on his brainchild. I hope Lagrange wins the Developers' Challenge 2016. It's definitely my Number One. ;-)