multiple envelopes playhead (purple bar) out of sync, when their attack time is widely spread

Hi there,

I struggle with the playhead of multiple envelopes (purple bar that shows up in each envelope) in Absynth 5 (current version 5.3.1, R1628 – running on Windows 10, all updates installed), when they have very different attack times, e.g. the OSC A amplitude envelope has an attack time of 12 seconds and the OSC A filter envelope one of 2 seconds.

Playing a note on a MIDI Keyboard or virtual keyboard of Absynth triggers the filter envelope immediately (which has the shorter attack time), but the amplitude envelope is not triggered at the same time (which a common timeline suggest), but with quite a huge offset – hence you see the offset of the purple playhead bars.

What’s strange though – I can immediately hear the sound, which means that the amplitude envelope must be started at the same time as the filter envelope, or I could not hear anything as long as the playhead of the amplitude envelope is not showing up.

So there must be something that causes the “visual offset”, but what is it? And if its not a bug, what is the sense of it?

I was very irritated as I browsed through some great sounding presets and try to understand how the evolving sound is created – looking at the envelopes and then lost my mind by trying to find out where this offset modulation comes from (e.g. the spacewalker preset).

This behavior can be reproduced with a simple new sound – just Oscillator A in single mode with a sinewave and a filter: setting the attack time of the OSC amplitude to 12 sec (at least some time apart from the filters attack) and creating an envelope for the filter setting the attack time to 2 sec – the attached screenshots shows that setup and some variations.

And there is another form of “out of sync”: if you set the attack time of both the amplitude and the filter envelope to a high but the same value like 12 e.g., the playheads are “visually in sync”, but not in sync with the audio, which means you can hear sound before even one playhead (purple bar) shows up.

The behavior is the same if I run Absynth as a standalone synthesizer or as a VST plugin in a DAW (Ableton Live 10 by the way) – it even makes no difference if its hosted in a DAW and I change Host-Sequencer synchronization for the envelopes (“Sync” button pressed or not in the “Selected Envelope” panel).

This visual indicator seems to be a huge helper for sound design in Absynth, if I just could get my head around it ;-) … as it empowers the sound-designer to understand what creates that variation in sound or timbre at that specific point in time (you hear it and there you see it – awesome !!) … it’s a perfect guide to get an idea which parameter could be modified (bending the curve, adding breakpoint, more movement and so on), to change something that might result in an interesting sounding result – for me it’s a source of inspiration, excitement & encouraging to screw & shape the sound.

But this guidance & inspiration breaks with the strange behavior of the playheads, leading to assumptions that the timelines we see during “envelope creation” (sound design time) in the envelope display are not the same during playtime.

Can anyone shed a light on it ;-) … any idea or inside knowledge is very appreciated – thanks in advance.

… and I search the manuals as well but did not find anything accordingly.

cheers
dayaw