Friday, September 07, 2007

The DSI Prophet '08

Some quick impressions after spending some time with this synth.

Soundwise its very similar to the DSI Polyevolver Keyboard with the following exceptions, the louder settings tend toward warm saturation-style distortion rather than clipping and, to me, the filter has a little bit more of that "CS80" vibe...slightly buzzy (but not in a bad way at all)...

Many of the presets are dual-layer and sound wonderful, but in a real-world mix, I think I would mainly end up using single-layer patches to preserve some bandwidth. There is such a thing as "too fat" Wink

Long soft evolving pads are easy to do as are 'stacked" 16-osc basses (wow - serious "punch"!). The sound is rich without being overbearing. Thinner sounds are possible too but not as easy as the PEK as there's no highpass filter...even so, ripping leads are possible - the filter FM is nice for adding animation and the Sync can be brutal depending on the depth of the sweep.

The keybed on the Prophet'08 is very nice! Its firm yet moderately weighted for a nice compromise between expression and speed. I prefer this key action over the PEK...but just by a bit, the PEK's is one of the better ones out there IMHO.

While I thought having the wheels "up there" was going to be a PITA, in practice it dosen't bother me at all, the heel of my hand rests nicely on the edge of the endcheek.

It dosen't show in any of the the photos I've seen, but all the panel lights are a very deep red...

Lovely, lovely synth.



7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks James! Do you think you can talk about the 'modulations' section and tell us if its a super poly mod? :)

Carbon111 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Carbon111 said...

The modulation is fairly comprehensive. Each of the following can be routed wherever you like:

Modwheel
Velocity
Pressure
Foot Controller
Breath
Envelope 3
LFO 1
LFO 2
LFO 3
LFO 4


The following have their own dedicated routing:

Filter Env --> Filter Cutoff
Amp Env --> Amp
Oscillator 1 --> Filter Cutoff

There are four freeform modulstion routings as well - you can rout any source to any destination:
http://carbon111.com/prophet08_mods.jpg

Overall, it has more modulation possibilities than the Prophet5 ever did barring acouple of audio-rate osc modulations - thankfully the four LFOs go well into the audio range and can even track the keyboard so thats really not a concern...

Zeroc001 said...

Some sounds:

http://www.ex5tech.com/demos/Prophet_'08/

Anonymous said...

carbon, i noticed yours is for sale already.
Mind if i ask why?

Carbon111 said...

I need the money and desperately need the room...and its currently on the bottom of the synth totem pole here at Rusty Insects :)

I have a heavily modded Arp Axxe and a few other synths up for sale as well...

Anonymous said...

:-)
i see
thanks