Creamware Noah
The Creamware Noah was a successless Synthesizer which should bring together the best of the two world - hardware and software synthesizers. It is a 19" 2U box featuring 6 or 11 AD SHARC DSPs. This box wasn't a static synthesizer you have to take as it is, but it was a platform where synthesizer plugins could be installed. Those software synthesizers were based on the SCOPE platform plugins, in fact, the Noah is a small SCOPE platform as a standalone unit.
The market success of this synthesizer was way below the expectations, which led Creamware to the decision to greate a last edition of 111 units called the "Noah EX Final Edition", which were sold for 1.111 EUR per unit. Even today, one may occasionally hit one of those units in a store, maybe even for 990 EUR today.
As the machine is EOL, no further plugins will be programmed, and CreamWare published all available plugins without the need of a license key, so every Noah owner can use those plugins. As of today, the following plugins exist for the Noah:
- Profit5 - a Sequential Circuits Prophet5 emulation
- EDS8i - a vintage analog drum
- Prodyssey - an ARP Odyssey emulation
- Six-String - a guitar modeling synthesizer
- Vectron - a vector synthesizer, maybe inspired by the Korg Wavestation
The following plugins were included in the base system:
- B-2003 - the emulation of the classic Hammond B3 Organ
- Lightwave - a wavetable based synthesizer
- Minimax - emulation of the well-known Moog Minimoog
- Vectron Player - stripped version of the Vectron plugin
- Pro-One - SCI Pro-One emulation, this was developed together with Wine Country
The device was available in 2 versions, the Noah, featuring 6 DSPs and the Noah EX with 11 DSPs, doubling the computing performance. In other aspects, the units were identical.
The 2U enclosure of the Noah contains a standard ATX power supply to feed all the electronics, as inputs and outputs, it features USB 1.1, optical audio with selectable 8 channel ADAT or 2 channel S/PDIF protocol, a wordclock connector was also present besides 2 channel analog input and 2 channel analog output. On the front, several buttons and rotaty encoders surround a large 2x40 characters LCD and a compact flash slot to store plugins and data.
Although the synthesizer is sounding really good and has a fascinating architecture, it might be just a collectors item today.
