Product Reviews

Novation's V-Station virtual synthesizer marks the company's first foray into analogue modelling, following a series of highly regarded hardware releases, including last year's A and K-Station synths. The V-Station is the K's plug-in equivalent and users can swap settings between the real and virtual worlds, A or K to V and back.

Novation has also taken a future-facing stance with the Mac version: it needs Mac OS X 10.2, and is Audio Unit only. Furthermore, OS X 10.2.4 is recommended.

The interface is crisp and clear, and there are four tabbed screens: Main, Extra, Controls and Global. Most of the action takes place on the Main screen - divided into Oscillator, Mixer, Filter, Envelope and LFO sections - and switching screens is done by a button click.

The V-Station has inherited its sonic character

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- beguilingly called 'Liquid Analogue' - from the K-Station's sound engine, and sounds crisp, alive and sharp. Everything from bass to leads via pads and pianos is possible, whether full-phat or feather-light.

Its three oscillators can be set to sync, and Novation's Double facility, which provides twin waveforms for added depth and richness.

The 200 presets are divided among Bass, Hard Lead, Arpeggio, Dance, Pad, Keyboard, Strings, Brass, Organ, Soft Lead, FM, Trance and Motion settings. There are 400 user locations and entire banks can be created to group sounds together. The Compare button allows for A/B studies of original patch versus tweaked version.

One impressive feature was the Arpeggiator with optional synchronisation lock. When synced, you can quickly send complex, weaving synth lines shimmering in all directions. We also liked the effects (including delay, reverb and a nice auto-pan), six of which can be deployed per V-Station instance and which can also be synced to tempo.

We tested the V-Station in Logic 6 on a 1GHz dual-processor PowerMac G4 running OS X 10.2.3, and loaded seven different instances into a track. Playback was fine, and sounded pretty cool.

We enjoyed the V-Station. It has a great sound, is very easy to use, looks good and has enough editing control to continue throwing up new twists on the presets for some time. Well worth investigating.