As owner of both Synchron Strings I and Chamber Strings I the 75€ offer I got from VSL for upgrade was a no-brainer. I loved the idea from the presentation, and I decided to take a risk.
My first impression is very positive, and I think I may share some personal and objective points:
- the great sound of the original samples is still there and the editing work made by VSL to make them consistent and compatible with Synchron Player seems to be effective (my previous attempt to merge Chamber VI Pro and Synchron in a project was a bit painful due to dynamic differences: you had to re-edit almost every single note to get similar sound in a track, while now still some differences exist, but the response is more consistent and easy to manage. Obviously having now also the same patch and articulation structure helps a lot).
- the lybrary is light. The reason is it has only 1 set of samples, and to get "synchronized" it uses IR (like if you had a MIRx Synchron Stage available). On this point we should argue a bit... of course producing wet samples was not a good idea, and this is definitely the ideal solution, even because the lybrary can now be also used totally Dry, into MIR Pro projects, and this is for me a fantastic feature.
- being light you may really use it to merge into Synchron Strings I and fixing several of the missing features and little faults: legato perfromance is more clean, portamento is available, Xfade being processed dry is more clean, sforzato, marcato and fortepiano are more realistic and accurate, and the little sections are perfect to act as divisi. Last but not least merging Chamber into Synchron you get a gorgeous "appassionata-like" big string orchestra.
WEAKNESS AND POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENTS:
- the first question one will wonder is why they didn't create multi IR to mimic the Microphone set of Synchron. It was not creating additional samples, but just additional IRs. I suppose we have 2 possible reason: time constrain (fine tuning a set of IR is a long and painful work, then was easier to just make 1...) and reduced effectiveness due to phasing/unison issues not completely fixed by IR and processing. Anyway being it possible and recommended with MIR Pro creating additional Microphone for surround, maybe at least the surround additional IR will be available now or later.
- the way the Synchron articulations were recorded is very different from the VI series, and so despite the effort of editing, some little differences can create issues during mix (while the shorts are adding variation, maybe the sustain different attacks need a bit more care and tweeking, but the final result is ok). The most obvious is the Vibrato layers (2 instead of 3), where the Vibrato patch is made out of normal vibrato fading into Espressivo, creating a mismatch with Synchron, because Synchron has 3 layers (non vib, normal vib, and lyric vibrato). Probably made to save resources, anyway it's a pity, because Chamber s. original samples had 3 layers available.