▽ Coming Soon from Cherry Audio: Still the ① ▽

[Uncle E]

Midiverb II and Yamaha FX500 are famous for Shoegaze, so that would be the one to do.

[beely]

But IMO a ton of analog gear exists that there is no "good reasons though for wanting modern recreations of". Yet such emulations exist.

Anything you are specifically thinking of?

Most things that are done usually have some value or reason to do it - sometimes it's simply that the developer was interested in that bit of gear for various reasons (he used it as a kid, or found it in a junk shop and thought it was interested, or was just curious about how it worked). After all, why bother putting in that effort if there were really *no* good reasons to do it?

Who knows why the SPX-90 has been ignored by developers.

Indeed - but I gave you one reason - that it might simply not worth the effort of doing it, because it's not that interesting or good-sounding. If you want to reverbs, IR's will give you that and you can use them now.

Now, I wouldn't be surprised if someone *does* end up doing an end to end one, simply because the name alone, alongside some high-profile users and the seemingly desirable Symphonic algorithm, would probably generate sales - including to people who'd never even used one before.

Honestly, there's *hundreds* of mid-range rack boxes released throughout the eighties and nineties that are also simply not worth modelling - they are not good enough, unique-enough or interesting-enough to bother with - just a lot of "more of the same".

Someone just dropped an emulation of the Alesis Midiverb II and the hardware was regarded as pretty low end back in the day so that seems to remove one excuse for not doing the SPX.

Sure. Did you ask them why they did it?

Don't get me wrong, I love a good plugin emulation as much as the next one, and I have old, crap gear that I have some fondness for. But most of the stuff that does get emulated usually have good reasons for going to that effort, and so far the lack of an SPX90 just suggests that when developers are looking for a next box to emulate, despite being easily obtainable, the SPX90 never seems, so far at least, to make the cut. My suspicions as to why have already been suggested...

You don't have to agree my my stance, or try to change my opinion. Out of interest - what is your experience with the SPX90? Is it something you'd buy?

[Uncle E]

My guess is it's an above average level of work (lots of algorithms) for minimal reward (people won't pay more for a plugin than the real thing).

[beely]

My guess is it's an above average level of work (lots of algorithms) for minimal reward (people won't pay more for a plugin than the real thing).

For sure, one of these reasons these multi-FX boxes are complex is that there's so many algorithms, and reverse-engineering each of them to a sufficient degree of accuracy isn't trivial.

(Especially when many of them are pretty bad from devices in that era, when it was still early digital and processing and RAM were not cheap, so a lot of constraints compromised the DSP, making many of them not really worth the effort...)

At least for boxes where the original ROMs can be used, that saves the effort of having to figure out the algorithms, but we're now seeing a new bread of emulations - the Temecula ones are a good example - where AI can help with some of that grunt work, making some of these things more practical perhaps, for the people interested in doing so (hopefully on boxes where it's more worth the effort! )

[Examigan]

I had a Midiverb 4 and I thought it was pretty good. They are about $100-150 used, but I wouldn't want to get the used hardware if I could just use software instead. If it was less than $100, I'd buy it (if somone created it that is!).

[whassup]

I think I have a bit of an immunity to nostalgia. Maybe I’m blind to it, but every time I’ve gone back to gear that I have fond memories of from my past, I’m disappointed. The “magic,” wasn’t in the gear, it was in the time that I used it.

Yeah, some things keep up with the hype, some totally fail me these days.
Also important is that the first impact and the impact back then overall can't be replicated.
We listened to so much music since.
Nothing will bring back the perceptions of back then.
It was "Oh dang, what is Manfred Mann doing with that synth?"
Today it still sounds cool but it's "only a Mini".