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Discovery Pro is an evolution of the original Discovery synth.

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• Review

discoDSP's Discovery was one of the company's first and finest efforts. Heavily inspired by Clavia's Nord Lead series, Discovery earned a place on many a hard drive with its dual-oscillator architecture, resonant filter and built-in effects.

Borrowing the layers and morph abilities from the instrument that inspired it, Discovery was - and still is - a synth capable of blistering basses, lush pads and scorching solo sounds.

Discovery Pro ups the ante considerably - with more filter types, more oscillators and advanced features such as sample import - without exacting a prohibitive price. Yes, it costs twice as much as its sibling, but it's still hardly expensive and, as you'll see, it offers a much wider palette than the initial version.

Like the original, Discovery Pro is a PC VSTi that features a pair of virtual analogue oscillators, each of which is capable of spitting out the usual vintage-style waveforms. This time, however, the developers have tossed in a parabolic waveform that sounds
something like a cross between the sine and triangle varieties. It's ideal for mellow sounds and is tucked away under the sawtooth wave selection control on the front panel.

The oscillators are well-equipped for most analogue-style duties. You can sync them up, vary the pulse width and even perform a bit of ring modulation. Noise is provided in both white and pink flavours.

In addition to the two analogue-styled ones, Discovery Pro packs in a third oscillator that's devoted to sampled waves. It's a rudimentary affair, offering only a single sample per layer. Nevertheless, the bundled selection of waveforms includes
everything from plucked strings to vintage synths, and increases the sonic potential exponentially.

Better still, users can wrangle their own samples into the thing, although at this point the process becomes a bit fiddly, requiring one to compress a bunch of samples into a Zip file and change the file extension to '.dwb'.

We had a bit of trouble getting it to work until we discovered that the samples can't be placed in sub-folders. Only 16-bit files worked for us (though we were pleased that our loop points were recognised), and the developer recommends leaving 128 samples after the loop end to prevent clicking.

We're told that future updates will improve the sample management, but even now, the system is quite usable. In our opinion, the difficulties we encountered were less to do with the implementation and more to do with not having enough information. A few more tips in the otherwise excellent PDF manual wouldn't go amiss.

Features

Discovery Pro sports a feature-packed filter section, offering no less than a dozen types (including the usual low- and high-pass varieties in both 12 and 24dB incarnations). There's also a formant filter and four new Moog-style filters named X and Y (each comes in 12 and 24dB varieties).