From hudakjm@mcmaster.ca Mon May 10 11:35:46 2010
Subject:Re: Ventilator BX3 (and CX3) demos

First off, thanks to Bruce for putting up these demos. Much appreciated.

Now for my comments. I have a BX-3 that I run through a tube stereo preamp and a pair of tube monoblock power amplifiers. With this setup there is very little of the digital shrillness that people talk about. It may be there to some degree or another but to me it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. If I play the BX-3 through my all solid state bass guitar rig then yes, it's definitely there, and it really sounds pretty bad. Ditto through a pair of headphones.

I tried duplicating Bruce's settings as closely as possible. I played Bruce's samples through the same stereo system that I play my Korg through. To my ear I really don't hear any real dramatic improvement in the BX-3 sound played through the Ventilator as compared to the BX-3's internal Leslie sim. I've always been impressed with the sim in the Korg and so far I just don't hear enough of an improvement with the Ventilator. If I were in Bruce's studio listening live to his demo then I may very well hear a difference, but just not with the demos.

In most if not all Leslie sims I hear a wavering effect on certain notes or chords with the sim running on "slow". This is especially so with simple drawbar settings (only a few drawbars out). Something like a "chorus" effect on a guitar effects pedal. I chalk this up to the sim designers having to use some sort of varying tone to simulate the shimmering phase shifting effect of a Leslie. This effect becomes less noticeable with more complex drawbar settings (all 8's for example). I hear this in my Korg and I hear it in the Ventilator as well as in just about every other Leslie sim I've heard. I guess that's just the facts of life with sims and something we have to live with.

Where the Ventilator does seem to do well is with the overdrive sound. Not too shabby actually and I have to concede that it is probably better than the one in the Korg, although I think I can tweak the Korg a bit more to improve it.

For now I really don't see enough of an improvement over what I have now to justify the high price of the Ventilator. I'm going to build myself a high gain dual channel tube preamp to see if I can amp up the grunge level even more in my Korg.

Of course the downside with any of these sims is that to get that swirly around the room effect you really have to run into a stereo system, which is what I'm doing now at home. Out on the road I can see that one can get away more with just a straight mono signal.

I'm not an expert keyboard player or anything like that. I'm just a guitar/bass player trying to learn the keys in my middle age because I regret not having learned when I was younger. That's my 2 cents worth. I'd be very interested to hear other folks comments. Thanks again to Bruce for the samples.

John