A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Arturia stepping up their game recently and revamping their line of softsynths into the new 64-bit future, meaning they'll run better on newer machines that have 64-bit processing. Since this blog has been around for only a year, this offers me a unique opportunity to revisit some of their older plugins. I was given 3 for review, and the first one I'll be talking about is the classic Prophet-V2 plugin, based on the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5.
If you don't know, the Prophet 5 is a classic. It's been incredibly popular since its release in 1978, and was a huge step forward for synthesizer technology, being one of the first to have patch memory and polyphonic sound -- hence the "5", for the 5 voices, in the name. The synthesizer has been used by so many greats-- off the top of my head, Phil Collins-- that its status as legend has propelled its price point up into the thousands range. Enter Arturia, who take classic and convert them to code so the average musician can enjoy and perform with the sounds of the legends.
. Some of the patches are almost identical. While it's unfair to truly judge due to the sound quality Youtube offers (I'd love to see someone do this and upload it to SoundCloud), it does show that you could probably get away with certain plugs in mixes, especially for background sounds. It would also be interesting to compare these to the modern 
. While Arturia's plugins are of the most demanding CPU wise, they are among the best. Check out the videos and try to hear some differences yourself. Of course, don't get me wrong, I'd take real analog any day...