well those circles probably don’t overlap.
I think the Venn diagram of people who’d love a Poly-800 emulation, and the people who are talented enough to code a good one. The question is, who would do it? Considering it’s mostly thought of as a pariah, it would have to be a labor of love. When you think of how well a much more complicated synth like the Model D or Prophet 5 have been emulated pretty well, it would seem to me like a Poly-800 could easily be emulated. Not many like its sound, and I totally understand that, Makes me uniqueI completely agree with all of that except for the “cannot be emulated” bit. Whilst the original 800's chorus is nothing spectacular the Mk11 has a great dubby sounding delay that's phase inverted, essentially the same delay as the DW, DSS and SDD but stripped down (a nightmare for dance music producers who will be thinking in mono more than most) The paraphonic filter they both share is the smoothest I've ever heard and with a lot of sustain can produce amazing and quite beautiful harmonic chords. Not that many parameters to adjust so the arcane system is fine and can be quite fast once you know the way it works. The Poly 800 and it's brother the 800MkII are very limited by todays standard, but the sound they produce just cannot be simulated, they are both very very saturated sounding, great for slow thick basses and weird haunting strings, very dark and synthetic, not at all realistic. Secondly we are a demanding bunch these days, we want our gear to sing, scream, modulate in any way imaginable, be able to integrate with old and new and to have effects to die for, obviously the Poly 800 fails in ever sense here.įinally I'm just so fed up with people not understand what a paraphonic filter is, and no it is not a Juno 6/60
When I listen to the 1000's of presets in most VSTI's or any post 2010 hardware synths I hear a hard/fast edge that is totally impossible and complete opposite to the Poly 800 can do, this in itself rules out a lot of people checking out one of these in 2020. Over the years I've often wondered why the Poly 800 get such a diverse reaction, well I think I now know why.įor a start it's not a fast synth, envelopes are sluggish, hard to get anything fast going.