IDK what y'all are galking about, but VCO's and DCO's have huge differences. I have been doing Analog synths for only about 7 years now, but they are easy to tell apart. Now I did just get a Prophet rev2 and I will say as far as DCO's go theybare the best sounding DCO's I have ever heard, but Ill probably get the Prolouge also for it's 16 voice dual VCO synth nature to play uinison. To me they are made for each other. The rev2 has a deeper synth engine, but the prolouge will back it up and make the soind fuller and richer with it's VCO's. VCO's are thicker than DCO's and put out more sound of pure electricity is the only way I can thinknto explain.
This is the dogma... you will notice that people tend to use only subjective terms when describing differences between VCOs and DCOs... it's widespread across the synth community, and has been for many years. That's what actually led me on my journey to try and document the differences - I wanted to understand objectively / scientifically what the differences between DCOs and VCOs were. I recorded hundreds of samples from dozens of synths - many classics like Yamaha CS-80, Roland Jupiter 4, Jupiter 8, Oberheim OBX, OBXa, Prophet 5, Prophet 10, Korg Polysix, Memory Moog and several other classics, as well as a variety of modern VCO and DCO synths. There are two objective differences that can be measured:
First, all VCOs do exhibit a small amount of frequency jitter / harmonic jitter... In a practical setting with multiple voices/oscillators playing together, it's almost impossible to distinguish between DCO and VCO. In a situation with isolated, single, stable oscillators playing, there is a small difference though. More info on Harmonic Freq Jitter here:
https://www.presetpatch.com/articles/VCO-Harmonic-JitterSecond - the big difference - VCOs have inherently "bad tuning performance" over large octave ranges (aka: Lots of Character). If you measure even the most modern VCO implementations across a five octave range, you are almost certain to have at least 5-6 cents variance from nominal, up and down the keybed, and per oscillator, per voice. This tuning performance is usually "intonation based". Classic VCO synths often have 10-20 cents variance over a five octave range, sometimes even more. They also are prone to variance with heat and humidity.
https://www.presetpatch.com/articles/VCO-vs-DCO-Oscillators-Objective-DifferencesOn the other hand, DCOs are perfectly accurate up and down the keybed when it comes to nominal tuning frequency, for all voices and all oscillators. This was what I found in my measurements that led to the Voice Component Modeling paper/article. The "sound of VCOs" is really the sound of natural phasing of slightly detuned (
but relatively stable) oscillators per voice. On a poly synth with six voices and three oscillators, that's a total of 18 oscillators that each will have their own tuning profile across multiple octaves. The differences between nominal target frequency and actual frequency may be small (ie: <5 cents), but when you add that up across multiple voices being played and multiple oscillators per voice, it creates this "beautiful/warm/organic/thicker *insert_your_subjective_term* " sound.
More info on all this here:
http://www.VoiceComponentModeling.com