05.24
Out of nothing more then curiosity I wanted to know the fundamental differences between the Moog Voyager & Minimonsta. The filter is obvious so I didn’t even want to have that in the equation. I wanted to look at the raw building blocks, the oscillator waveforms. These are my results.
MP3
voyager-saw
Minimonsta-saw
voyager-tri
Minimonsta-tri
voyager-square
Minimonsta-square
24 bit WAV
voyager-saw
Minimonsta-saw
voyager-tri
Minimonsta-tri
voyager-square
Minimonsta-square
Visuals
Voyager-Saw
Minimonsta -Saw
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Voyager-tri
Minimonsta-tri
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Voyager-Square
Minimonsta -Square 
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The original test has the filters set to wide open on both synths. I don’t think the original ever fully takes the filter out of the picture. So with some further knob twiddling I have found if you add a little resonance on the voyager the wave shapes get pretty damn close. I’m thinking the voyager just has a wider filter range.
Voyager Saw + filter res
Voyager Square + filter res
Thanks for the test, It is a big suprise how big the difrence is when I listen to it.
very nice job! interesting indeed!
[...] listen with your own ears: rhythminmind from the “Signal to Noize” blog posted an in-depth comparison between the real Moog Voyager hardware synth and our Minimonsta:Melohman virtual instrument. Listen [...]
Please note that the Minimonsta was modelled after an original Minimoog, not a Moog Voyager. You’ll find here some oscillator recordings of the Minimoog on which the Minimonsta is based on :
http://ldesoras.free.fr/audio/minimoog-samples.zip
Also: the square wave of our Minimoog was not exactly square (PW a bit off), and it seems that the various Minimoog out there have the same behaviour, but with different pulse width inaccuracies. Anyway we deliberately chose to emulate it with a PW of exactly 50 %.
Minimonsta is closer to the Model D for sure. I have found if I set the Voyager resonance to “2″ the wave shapes are near identical between the two. I just added some new pic’s to show the results. All in all it’s noway a measure of quality. The Voyager, Model D, & Minimonsta can all make great moogesk sounds.