![]() ![]() Nothing show-stopping of course, but I always find that a bit disappointing. Another quibble is that there are a fair few spelling errors in the in-app quick tutorials provided by Arturia. Once I’ve got all the programs off that, I doubt I will use it again. I’ve had a couple of crashes within Cakewalk, and I have heard crackling, but I think this is due to my system being stretched to its limit already, or may be attributable to the less than solid SQ8L. I’ve noticed that LFO waveforms might be ordered differently because a program that calls for noise is being assigned a saw wave. I am editing programs simultaneously in both the hardware and the software as I write this up, to see where, or if, sounds begin to diverge, so far the results are alike, even though the process and values are quite different. Amazing! Programs can be classified, tagged, favourited and generally made a lot easier to find, sort and reorganise than they ever were in the hardware (or on audio cassette or floppy disk). ![]() In other words, it is a superset of the old synths.Īnother way this manifests itself is that program names can now be long and in both upper and lower case. There are three ways to set up envelopes in place of Ensoniq’s one, an arpeggiator, new unison settings, and so on. It also incorporates elements of the VFX methods for sound engineering, that were not catered for in the early Ensoniq program sysex. It has a suite of effects, which can be saved as part of individual programs. The recoding is understandable when you consider that the SQ80 V is much more than the SQ-80. For some reason, just to be different, the envelope parameters stick to Ensoniq’s integers. ![]() The range of a DCA was, and is, encoded as 0 to 63, in increments of 1, whereas Arturia expresses it as 0.00 to 1.00 in increments of 0.004 or thereabouts. The other thing is that it looks like Arturia re-encode most parameters in decimal form, whereas ESQ-1 and SQ80 programs used integer values. Arturia’s proprietary file format is the only form of output I can see so far. So what I learnt from that was that once programs go into the SQ80 V, there is no getting them out again. Arturia support suggested deleting the temporary file C:\ProgramData\Arturia\Presets\db.db3, which apparently can obstruct program (Arturia call them presets) updates. Subsequent imports have behaved perfectly. The second time it happened I exported the bank to Arturia’s proprietary sysex format, deleted the offending bank, and reimported it without problems. The first time it happened I deleted what appeared to be duplicates by hand, only to find that I had one by one deleted every program in the bank. Twice the Arturia software appeared to duplicate every program in the bank, telling me there were 80 when I had uploaded only 40, but this problem seems to have gone away. I ran into some odd behaviour when I imported a bank of ESQ-1 programs. It should be though, as the old and free 32-bit SQ8L, which still works, is also close (even though it has some differences the developer deemed improvements). With their gains balanced, playing the same programs on the original 1986 hardware ESQ-1 and the new 2021 software SQ80 V, I am hard-pressed to tell them apart, so my verdict is that this is a faithful emulation. The SQ family were state of the art for ease of programming in the 1980s, but expectations and technology have changed since then. My first impression is that it is so much better all round to have graphical representations of synthesis parameters like envelopes and filters than just digital readouts. Despite (or perhaps because of) owning a working Ensoniq ESQ-1 and copies of the now abandoned SQ8L and Krosswave software emulations of the ESQ-1’s successor, the SQ-80, this week I spent actual money on yet another emulation of the SQ-80, the Arturia SQ80 V. ![]()
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