The original synth was more than reasonable by the standards of the time, with a fastest VCA Attack of around 1ms, and a fastest VCA Decay of about 9ms.
Moving on, I measured the fastest transients that the two synths can generate, which revealed some stunning results. Copy protection is by means of a USB dongle.
Prophet V will run as a stand-alone application, and as a VST or RTAS plug-in on both the PC and Mac, as a DXi plug-in under Windows, and as an AU plug-in on the Mac. This restricted the number of notes that I could play simultaneously, but introduced no other problems, which is a compliment to Arturia's programming.
Consequently, much of this review was conducted on a sub-spec machine.
Here is an original hardware Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, the look of which has been mimicked very closely by Arturia.The noise generator on my Prophet 10, while suffering from the cyclic 'thump' that bedevils early Prophets, sounds 'whiter' than that of the soft synth, and a spectrum analyser confirms this, showing that the soft synth's white noise spectrum exhibits a marked fall-off above 5kHz, ending up almost 20dB down at 20kHz. The square waves and triangle waves were closer to the originals, but all three of the soft synth's waves sounded less bright than those generated by my Prophet 10. The original synth was noticeably brighter, the soft synth sounding just a little 'softer' than the original, and the difference was also clearly visible on an oscilloscope. Opening the filters fully on both synths (using both the cut-off-frequency knob and the filter envelope), defeating any modulation, and selecting the sawtooth wave on Oscillator A on both the soft synth and the Upper synth of my Prophet 10, I played middle 'C' on both, and expected to hear an all-but-identical sound. As luck would have it, I just happen to have a Prophet 10 to hand! Prophet 5 Emulation: Oscillators & FiltersĪrturia's literature states that they modelled their Prophet 5 emulation on the Rev 2 and Rev 3 models of the original synth, so the best instrument for comparison would be a Rev 3 Prophet 5 or a Prophet 10, which, if you ignore a handful of enhancements, is just a pair of Rev 3s in wolf's clothing. However, it differs from Arturia's earlier products, because it emulates not one, but two vintage classics: the Prophet 5 from 1978, and the hybrid analogue/digital Prophet VS from 1986.
Arturia's Prophet V in its Prophet 5 mode.Īrturia emulate both the classic Prophet 5 and the lesser-known Prophet VS synthesizers in their latest software instrument.Īrturia's previous soft synths - the Minimoog V, Moog Modular V, ARP 2600V, and CS80V - have been generally well-received by reviewers and players alike, so Prophet V joins a respected family of recreations of vintage instruments.