Cherry Audio Releases GX-80 Synthesizer

[Echoes in the Attic]

ME80 still king. And I say that has someone who no longer owns it but owns the arturia. ME80 is the best. If it goes VST I might have to get it again. I much prefer the mpe on the arturia. I feel like a cs-80 should have mpe because of how expressive it was with poly AT.

[teilo]

ME80 still king. And I say that has someone who no longer owns it but owns the arturia. ME80 is the best. If it goes VST I might have to get it again. I much prefer the mpe on the arturia. I feel like a cs-80 should have mpe because of how expressive it was with poly AT.

If you like it, great. But it sounds nothing like a CS-80. It is CS-80ish at best. The Arturia V4, on the other hand sounds like a real CS-80. So does the GX-80.

[Aloysius]

GX-80 is not just another CS-80 emulation. GX-80 adeptly integrates the GX-1's distinctive feature set into the CS-80 architecture ...

[Lbdunequest]

I wish UI wasnt so accurate, its really uninviting to use

[Echoes in the Attic]

ME80 still king. And I say that has someone who no longer owns it but owns the arturia. ME80 is the best. If it goes VST I might have to get it again. I much prefer the mpe on the arturia. I feel like a cs-80 should have mpe because of how expressive it was with poly AT.

If you like it, great. But it sounds nothing like a CS-80. It is CS-80ish at best. The Arturia V4, on the other hand sounds like a real CS-80. So does the GX-80.

Arturia is nice for the pads and strings. The basses can not get close. And there isn’t the sharpness for the more cutting sounds. There are just lots of sounds the hardware can make that the arturia can’t. ME80 can get closer to some sounds I think.

[FotoxBr]

But yeah "not hearing anything that makes me want to spend $59" is the implication dill hole.

Really ? Why are you asking opinions about something you do not find interesting ? I do not understand you. Maybe because English is not my native language.

Because maybe I'm interested in what other people think of something regardless of what my plans are? How is this surprising? We're on forums man. If you're not here to talk to people wtf are you doing here?

You are right. I am out. Bye.

[Arashi]

I wish UI wasnt so accurate, its really uninviting to use

There's a lot of room for improvement.

• The white hashmarks are too bright and distract from the slider positions. Dropping the opacity of those to 50% would help a lot.
• The illuminated buttons are hard to read.
• The exaggerated perspective on the text of the effects buttons looks bad. The angle is totally wrong for the shape of the button.
• The way the effects controls are disabled when the corresponding effect button is disabled is poor UX. It's not at all obvious you need to find a button somewhere else in the UI to enable them.
• I don't know why they bother drawing shadows on keys if they're not gonna do it correctly. When you press a key, the key to the left of it casts a shadow on it. But if you press two adjacent keys, they both have exactly the same shadow, even though the one on the left should no longer be casting a shadow on its neighbor. They get this wrong in every product, and most other companies do too. Why not just drop the keyboard and other decorative areas that just waste screen space so the usable controls can be made larger?

[Arashi]

UI aside, GX-80 sounds really good. They did a great job on the filters.

As usual, there are lots of great presets. This is important, as the CS-80 interface is inscrutable to anyone who hasn't spent a bunch of time with it, and it doesn't exactly invite you to dive in. I know my way around it, but I think most people will stick to presets and maybe tweak them a little.

For CS-80 fans, I think it's worth picking this up even if you already have Arturia's CS-80 V4 (which is also really good). Each one has different features and possibilities.

[Tj Shredder]

Why not just drop the keyboard and other decorative areas that just waste screen space so the usable controls can be made larger?

Especially the heat grid seams weird on a fanless M2. Did they emulate the fan sound as well? To be accurate with all the stuff you didn‘t want to have back in the days…

[Scotty]

Why not just drop the keyboard and other decorative areas that just waste screen space so the usable controls can be made larger?

Especially the heat grid seams weird on a fanless M2. Did they emulate the fan sound as well? To be accurate with all the stuff you didn‘t want to have back in the days…

There are real GUI experts in this forum who have high standards and do this kind of work for a living. For me having a resizable screen and buttons and sliders that are big enough to read and use with ease is the most important feature. The activation of the effects and various combinations of presses that turn off and on gui attributes is confusing until you watch a video. Starsky's video helped me out with that. I'm not knocking it too hard. Those fan plates should be tossed if there is nothing under them. Otherwise , I've seen a lot worse and this sounds great.

[Sound Mechanics]

I must admit that the GUI isn't quite as polished as the new Arturia CS-80 V4 and I like the ME-80 (fond of it as a beta tester), but I like to see everything in one window if possible.
Those presets though... they sound great!
My simple test - If I flick through a few presets and get inspired to start a track, then that's what I'm looking for in a synth (before I touch any controls).
Would also like to see an arpeggiator squeezed in somewhere.

[WatchTheGuitar]

Seen a lot of people talking about high CPU issues and I did get that when trying to really push some things like 2 layers with 16 voices, lots of effects and oversampling, but I also noticed I was getting what seemed like CPU noise in certain situations when looking in my PC I saw no cores maxing out and I traced it to the master volume limiter introducing horrible digital noise when the volume maxed out which sounds almost identical to what you get when a CPU spikes!

Tweaking this control to keep everything in the green helped...

gx80 layer limiter.png

[wwjd]

Yeah I always shut their limiters off. I can roll old school and pay attention to volumes or use a cleaner limiter.

[Vortifex]

The way the effects controls are disabled when the corresponding effect button is disabled is poor UX. It's not at all obvious you need to find a button somewhere else in the UI to enable them.

Yeah that got me, I was like wtf why can't I move the controls. Took me a while to notice the other buttons.

[WatchTheGuitar]

Yeah I always shut their limiters off. I can roll old school and pay attention to volumes or use a cleaner limiter.

Was mainly saying make sure the master volume level was set in the green because even if you have the limiter on it can go into the red if you have a big chord.
Seems to use a really basic summing mixer. Could well be modelling exactly the same behaviour as seen in the hardware, but worth noting as the effect of digital audio maxing is a lot harsher than in an overdriven analog signal path.