How does everyone feel about the new Prophet-5 VST from GForce?
It's been over a week since it came out. I can't believe that we got two Prophet emulations within the same month (the other being Pro-A5) and two licensed/official emulations on a single day (the other being Cherry Audio's ESQ-1)! After the trial ended, I pulled the trigger on it because of how good it sounded. I compared it with the Rev 3 filter extensively to Repro-5 (which I own) and Expanse-5 (trial) at a 96 kHz sampling rate with MDR-7506 headphones on. I did not find them to be significantly different except for when it came to filter FM. While Repro-5 sounds very good in its own right, it sounds somewhat sterile and VA-like compared to the other two. However, if you care about stable tuning across notes, it's still great for that. Even the filter FM sounds more stable than in the other two. I decided not to buy Expanse because it is very CPU-heavy despite how great it sounds. Its frequencies sound more pronounced than in Repro, but the GForce one still has some of that depth or subtleties with modest CPU usage.
In my opinion, the GForce plugin has a very distinct and musical tone. It really has an almost analog sort of quality with the detuned notes and the saturation in the filter. My only gripes with it are a few bugs and how the filter FM can detune or vibrate rapidly in higher notes. I never owned a Prophet 5 (but do have a Fourm), so I cannot tell if that's how the filter FM on the hardware sounds. Otherwise, the waveforms and poly-mod provide nice musical tones, and the X-modulators are a welcome addition. Unlike the other Prophet plugins I have tried, the square wave in the GForce one has additional harmonics that give it an edge or slight distortion, and the knob needs to be set at 46.5 to make it sound more like a traditional square wave.
If you want something similar to the GForce one, I recommend multi/poly native. It can get really close to the Prophet sound except for the Xmod and the filter FM at certain frequencies. Repro also holds up IMO, and I don't know if I will sell it because I used it in so many projects. Let me know what your thoughts are about the plugin and whether you have compared it to your Prophet synth.