ZOMFG NEW *PROPHET* FROM DSI

Teaser thread

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We kept the sequencer, added the arpeggiator, and tacked on one or two more fun little functions.

 

Prophet '08. Eight voices, all analog. Shipping next week.

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As far as the price point goes..$2199 MSRP, $1999 MAP.

good stuff, CEM extravangaza! i would rather have them come up with something new but i got to say that it'll sound great for the money..!

i can't believe it how they managed to keep it a secret. i just don't get it.

but... yeah. wow. WOW!

*comes*

nice! would LOVE one of these.....pity it's like £1200

holy shit

every time i see that picture i max the volume and try to click on the play button. fuck off whoever took that screenshot, he should have trimmed the player controls out.

I dunno I'm just not that impressed.

I mean seriously, for all the "WOOO REAL ANALOGUES!" shit that gets bantered about, it's nothing that you couldn't effectively emulate with a VA and people (including you all) wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So then, since it's not modular, and it's not got any new or creative ways of working with it, it's kind of redundant.

come on man, give us a break, i thought we put that behind... there is not a VA that can sound like real analogue. and if there was, analogue sounds wouldn't just fall out of it, you'd have to try and tweak real hard to get them.

this thing sounds sweet. i like it alot. it looks it'll be a modern analogue poly, with a simple interface (unlike the A6), intended for playing. i can't say playing synths is my thing but i surely enjoy listening someone who plays. a good synth. analogue.

This sounds almost identical to a Nord Lead 2 and I'm not even joking. I have a feeling they modeled its filters off of the Prophet since they sound almost identical.

Analog purity is mostly elitist crap. I could spit out 20 synth lines from my Nord Mod and my Dotcom and you all would have no clue which came from an analog or digital source. The thing with vintage gear or big modulars in front of you is not at all about the sound being different, it's just about your head being different about how you interact with them. I just look at this and feel that for $2,000, it's not really going to add any sort of new dimension or ground to most peoples setup. Who can't make big ole' 80's Prophet pads like that?

well obviously i have to hear a nord modular. but until that moment, i will not agree with you. can we not argue about that?

Well but it's the whole dicussion of the Synth right? I'm being the dissenting voice here, asserting that this synth might not be worth the high price tag considering what it (doesn't) bring to the table -- much of anything new.

im just happy that some companies are going less menus more knobs.

Companies have been going less menu's more knobs for ages, c'mon.

The Nord Lead came out 12 years ago!

  ten fingers ten toes said:

I dunno I'm just not that impressed.

 

I mean seriously, for all the "WOOO REAL ANALOGUES!" shit that gets bantered about, it's nothing that you couldn't effectively emulate with a VA and people (including you all) wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So then, since it's not modular, and it's not got any new or creative ways of working with it, it's kind of redundant.

Do you know what ears are?

There is no way in hell that analog can be properly emulated to 'sound' analog, using digital sources. It's impossible. Lots of digital synths just sound really really plastic, and no matter how you EQ them, they just can't be compared to the fleshy warm sound of analogue.

no, i don't think it's impossible to make a real sounding VA. in fact, the other day i've been playing around in pd and have made a simple "VCO" with configurable drift, imperfect/frequency dependant waveshapers ... really nothing complex. and it sounds great! at least to my ears.

i don't understand how hardware VA synths don't feature some kind of osc drift simulation. it's really a trivial feature and if you ask me, it's a big part of what makes analogue, analogue.

so ... i do believe a VA could exist that sounds like the real thing. one thing is that i haven't heard any yet and the other thing is that i'm in love with wood, smell of hundreds of resistors and transistors burning energy away, red dimmed led's pulsing with LFO frequency, and potentiometers. not encoders. potentiometers. with big knobs. i'm in love with unpredictability, VCOs going out of tune, filters sometimes acting weird, noisy onboard bbd chorus effects. i'm in love with character of every analogue synth i've ever owned and if that makes me an analogue elitist, so be it.

i have a different kind of love for digital. i respect digital synthesis, alot. but it's another thing to me.

so... the P'08... i think it'll be really really great.

Yeah, you CAN program a VCA to sound 'real', but it'll always have a fake sounding edge to it. Because it's simply digital, and it just sounds different.

People have different interpretations on what 'analog' sounds like, so we can keep this discussion going on and on and on forever :)

but then again, that's what a discussion is for.

by VCA you probably meant VCO. but i don't agree: you CAN record a meaty, "warm", "organic", ANALOGUE vco signal digitally. you can. you can't deny that. now if you can record, sample it, than you can also synthesize it...

Come September when I have some time I'm going to do a big old comparison post between the Dotcom and Nord Modular. I'll just put up a bunch of samples and people can guess which is digital and which is analog. This should really seperate the men from the boys!

VA's do model real analogue osc drift and all that other goodness, btw. That's why it's called "analog modeling" and not "fake copy of analog". Fahz0r, kokoon and everyone else should definately stop by in September for it because it can be very eye opening.

Just a note that the Prophet 08 has digitally controlled oscillators, like a Juno 106, Prophet 600, Matrix 1000, etc., not voltage controlled oscillators. Probably still sounds great - I think DCOs still sound better than virtual analog, but there wont be the analog drift, and I've never heard a DCO synth that compares to real VCOs.

A good deal for what it is with all the knobs and whatnot, but I can't ever see myself buying any musical instrument for $2,000, no matter what it is. Especially since I still find lots of cheap analog gear fairly often where I live.

I meant VCO yeh. I can deny that, cause it still sounds different.

I must clear out that i stepped away from the idea it's entirely impossible, but you can't deny that it will never sound exactly the same, but just 'alike'. It's just like candy that has been around 50 years ago, but they stopped producing, and now they make replicas of the same candy "to have people relive their past/youth", but they never taste like they used to.

tftt, you're abit too stubborn to my taste, you seem to want to push your opinion above everyone else's because you're "obviously" the king of analogue and you've mastered every modulating technique there is in the world and you obviously want to show that. So for that, i'm not going to take part of your little survey, just to show you i don't really care about who is right in this discussion, but only care about a good discussion instead. Because, it's a good thing.

Translation: you're afraid you'll get it wrong.

Everyone wants to push their opinion above everyone elses, thats the point of the internet:

  kokoon said:

come on man, give us a break, i thought we put that behind... there is not a VA that can sound like real analogue.

  Fahz0r said:

Do you know what ears are?

 

There is no way in hell that analog can be properly emulated to 'sound' analog, using digital sources. It's impossible. Lots of digital synths just sound really really plastic, and no matter how you EQ them, they just can't be compared to the fleshy warm sound of analogue.

Both seem just as matter-of-fact to me

Why not liven up the discussion with some actual testing? I mean if the difference is supposed to be THAT obvious, shouldn't everyone score 100%?

*suppresses yawn*

look, it is impossible to model the all nonlinearities and peculiarities of a CEM-based synth in digital domain. you simply don't have enough processing power. but you'll get pretty damn close with some clever programming.

then theres the people who have a certain taste in sound (they like the beefiness of a prophet) and they just want to make musicstuffs with that sound, so DSI saves the day and makes a machine for those particular people - a nice complete package, no clever programming required, and a very nice interface to boot! (not too horribly expensive either)

me, if i'd go down this route, i'd buy a sci prophet600 for 100 bucks or so and keep some spare money for the bus ride home;)