The unrivaled, non-aliasing Expression Engine™, exclusive to Cakewalk Instruments, is at the heart of their unparalleled sound quality and capabilities for creative expression. Expression Engine provides rich resampling and synthesis, while simultaneously giving access to extended performance characteristics of sound programs.
Expression Engine is a multifunctional engine, providing capabilities for several types of synthesis under one hood, including multisample rendering, wavetable synthesis, REX playback and manipulation, waveguide synthesis, and an extensive DSP library of effects.
Like all digital instruments, Expression Engine’s audio engine relies on extensive audio resampling in order to generate musical instrument sounds. Expression Engine’s resampling leads the industry in clean, anti-aliased real-time sound production for multisample audio playback. (Aliasing is unfavorable digital distortion inherent in the process of resampling).
Expression Engine’s wavetable synthesis provides a resampling technique, which comes even closer to anti-aliasing perfection than multisample rendering. Wavetable synthesis utilizes a single, inaudible, one-cycle waveform, and through analysis and resampling, synthesizes this sound across the entire MIDI key-range. This process is similar in some respects to the propagation of simple waveforms found in analog modes of synthesis.
In addition, Expression Engine provides waveguide synthesis, a form of physical modeling that simulates the properties of real acoustic environments.