Prophet V

Playing the Devil's advocate here, I basically agree with most of the views of the other reviewers. So, I'm going to ocus on the VS aspect,

Arturia's 'Prophet V2' V/VS hybrid in Version 2 sounds like melted butter, the photorealistic GUI even animates (albeit slowly and hesitatingly even on a fast i7 machine) when you change the emulated synth (V, VS or V+VS). Cute!

Now, I'm no great aficionado of Virtual Analogs per se. I never owned a Prophet Five and I have no desire to. But I owned a VS for a couple of years, until I couldn't stand the interminable glitches and problems. For instance, controllable aftertouch (which is a vital tool of expression in the VS) depended on the synth sitting on a 100 per cent flat and horisontal surface. As soon as I put it on a stand, it would add aftertouch all by itself because the case twisted ever so little. The authorised Seqiential service guy grew really tired of me (and the VS) after a year or so.

No such problems with Arturia's take on the VS. And it sounds beautiful. It really does!

The problem is – it doesn't sound quite like a VS.

A VS should screech and rasp and cut with a razor sharp digital edge. It should alias. And it should also be capable of producing the slickest analog strings I've ever heard.

Arturia's VS is too polite and polished. In fact, even though the factory patches are available, sometimes I have to really guess at which of the original sounds it's doing its to emulate.

Thinking that perhaps my memory had been dulled after many years, I fired up Vector Sector, the (unfortunately abandoned) virtual VS that was created by General Vibe, including people who had worked on the original Sequential Circuits instrument.

And there was the VS vibe as I remembered it!

The 'Prophet V2' VS emulationsometimes comes reasonably close, but in the end – no real cigar. And, in the buggy tradition of Arturia, Prophet V2 in VS mode crashes Live 8 in flames (Mac 10.6.8) every time I try to tweak the oscillator levels or waveforms.

So it seems I'll have to keep my aged G5 PPC Mac to be able to run Vector Sector, since it was never updated to run on Intel machines. Or can I hope that Arturia will get the VS right in (a hypothetical) version 3, with its warts and aliasing and all?Read Review