Product Reviews by KVR Members

This synth competently does what has been done before. It's a solid subtractive virtual analog with a corresponding workflow, sound and feature set. A rather crowded market, so naturally there's a lot of competition there.

That is, until you take the price point into account.

See, most of the aformentioned competition will cost you upwards of 100 euros for a comparatively similar sound, if a bit cleaner. And this one is free. Suddenly there are a lot less competitors :).

Moreover, most of those other free VA lack either looks, sound quality, or ergonomics of GR-8, or are simply too unruly in comparison. If you want to get started with VA, you can't really do much better, .

It's hard to rate free products, because mathematically speaking, any musically functional free synth automatically gets 5 stars by its quality/cost ratio (as the cost is zero), so in this review I'm ranking the synth's sound and workflow on their own merits, disregarding the price. Ultimately tho, this is the second best free subtractive VA out there, and not by a long stretch.

A rather good sounding compressor, but there are a few issues.

1. No make-up or output gain. I don't think I have to elaborate on why this is a problem for a comrpressor.

2. Oversampling is a CPU hog. And I think I know why.
2a. x8 is an overkill for a compressor.
2b. Judging by what is written in the description, it needlessly upsamples Mid and Side signal, which turns x8 oversampling into x16 CPU usage for no reason, as Mid-Side can be converted from Left-Right and back with no data loss at any point. After upsampling, for example.

So yeah, would like to use it, but can't use oversampling as it eats 50% of my CPU power and have to use a separate gain plugin after (and before too actually) this one to properly gain-stage.