why don't you buy a real CS 80?
No matter, Vincent, yet many people asked me why don't I buy the real CS80; the answer you could maybe find in one of the reasons why the guys at Arturia designed the softsynth: the CS80 is a big monster and sounds adequately to its appearance and heave but, all in all, it sounds more or less like any other analogue of that time. Yamaha abruptly stopped the production of the CS80 in 1980 and ceased to burn the iG series chips in around 1981, giving away the burning facility itself; now the fact is that this monster is going to have a small life span because any critical part is going to suffer from age and, as replacement is scarce and most of the old and good CS50s and CS60 were cannibalized for spare parts, you can realize that, when all the parts will be gone, you will better keep your CS80 under a glass bell, 'cause it's maybe harder to repair than a GX1. And I don't have the money to keep it efficient.
Now, as I'm not a collector and I want to to enjoy something as long as I can I can't worry if I hit a key too hard . So when the CS80V went out in the shops I was excited to say the least. When I first heard it I was kind of disappointed that there were some minor bugs but nothing really unrecoverable, and joined an email exchange with old friend Xavier who was chief engineer for the CS80V project at the time ;while this exchange lasted he was glad that I pointed him to some little mistakes he didn't give attention to when the CS80V was launched; so he gave me credit when it mattered to fix the ringmodulator's "modulation", agreed to set a primeval form of card detune ( really he didn't understood that the trimmers would have served a detune between each couple of cards rather than a synched tuning) and found challenging the redesign of the Chorus Tremolo. Then the 1.5 version came out.
Now, Vincent,as I told many times and in many places, it's not about the sound which is actually very close: it's mostly about some routings of the CV signals plus some minor corrections (mostly velocity, ringmodulator, chorus);keeping Origin away for a moment, this is where I don't understand the restraint of any people there about reading something on the Group or here and think: «Let's hear what this asshole is crying for» .
Think Vincent that in the past two years I've sent tons of documentation that some people didn't even know, I explained to Frederic where to go about portamento, ribbon and sustain update, when he submitted to me a complain from one of the big names endorsing Arturia synths , who was a previous owner of several CS80s and that couldn't achieve some effects he could do live with the real thing at the times and asked for a fix.
So, why still I don't buy a real CS80,after all? Because I still believe this CS80V could be a great instrument rather than a marketing move (IMVHO, though), I still believe in the CS80V and I still believe that you can make it better.
