I measured the longest Attack as 56 seconds, but more important, of course, are the minimum Attack, Decay, and Release times. However, WOW have taken the opportunity to extend the envelope times of TimewARP 2600. TimewARP' s transient generators, VCA, output mixer, and reverberator follow the design of the ARP 2600 precisely, with no additional frills. That's six semitones too high! To obtain a true 440Hz output, I had to set the filter cutoff frequency to 309Hz. When I set up the filter resonance so that the filter was self-oscillating and the Tool Tip read 440Hz, the actual output measured at 621Hz. While the emulation is almost mathematically pure, the hardware synth is much brighter.It was while making these tests that I noticed that the cutoff control's Tool Tip shows the wrong frequency values. The TimewARP 2600's sine-wave spectrum (bottom) and the ARP 2600's sine-wave spectrum (top) for a 440Hz tone. Due to a miscalculation, the 4072 had a bandwidth of about 12kHz, so ARP 2600s from 1976 onward had a duller sound than earlier units. I suppose that you could hypothesise that WOW modelled TimewARP 2600 on a later version of the ARP 2600, one that used the ARP4072 filter. This means that at maximum cutoff frequency with no resonance the soft synth audibly attenuates high frequencies to a far greater extent than the hardware. Despite WOW's claims to the contrary, I was unable to make it increase beyond this, no matter how many positive voltages I applied to its CV inputs. (When last I saw it, it was heading up toward 30kHz and still going strong.) In contrast, TimewARP' s filter ranges from 10Hz at the bottom to approximately 10.2kHz at the top. Testing the ranges of the two instruments' filter cutoff frequencies, I found that the ARP's filter ranges from 12Hz at the low end to way, way off the scale at the upper end. (On the ARP 2600 itself, this is always 100 percent). The TimewARP 2600 filter section sticks to the configuration of the ARP 2600, with the exception of an added KBD CV Amount control. By locking the oscillators' phases and eliminating any movement, WOW have significantly affected the nature of any two- and three-oscillator sounds, eliminating the warm, organic movement that occurs on a true multi-oscillator vintage instrument. When tuned to the same pitches, the phases of all three oscillators are always the same! Without phase-locking (as occurs by accident in some vintage synths) this would only happen by chance on an analogue synthesizer, even if you could tune the oscillators perfectly. However, there's an even more significant way in which TimewARP 2600 differs from the real thing. This implies that WOW have modelled their waveforms on ideal waveshapes, not those derived from real ARP 2600s with real components and less than perfect calibration. Repeating these experiments with the triangle wave, I found that TimewARP' s is again more 'true' than the ARP 2600's, and I obtained equivalent results for the square and pulse waves. The sine waves appear more similar visually, but listening to them reveals that the ARP 2600 is bright, whereas TimewARP sounds like the 'pure' tone that a sine wave should be. However, don't be too harsh on the developers - I only recently discovered that the ARP 2600's oscillators produce sawtooth waves at audio frequencies, but a misshapen ramp (that changes markedly when you start patching it to different destinations) in LF mode. Immaterial at audio frequencies, this makes a huge difference when using the oscillator as an LFO. Indeed, WOW seem unable to tell the difference between a sawtooth wave and a ramp wave. This is surprising, because the waveforms show marked visual differences on an oscilloscope. (This is in sharp contrast with Arturia's 2600V, which offers additional octave selectors, oscillator sync, and scaling controls for the keyboard CV inputs.) So how true to the original do TimewARP' s oscillators sound? LIning up my own ARP 26P keyboard alongside my Mac running TimewARP 2600, I started by comparing the the sawtooth waves, and was encouraged to find that the two instruments sounded very similar. Oscillators & Noise GeneratorĪs you would expect, TimewARP' s oscillator section is modelled on that of the original ARP 2600, the only differences being that VCO 1 and VCO 3 each have a sine-wave output. Installing and authorising the software is straightforward if you do it on a machine connected to the Internet, but WOW provide a couple of workarounds if you prefer to keep your studio computer solely for music use. This new instrument from Californian company Way Out Ware joins Arturia's 2600V in emulating ARP's 2600 semi-modular synthesizer. Can this second in-depth software emulation of the ARP 2600 improve on Arturia's existing 2600V?
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