My first impression on Prophet REV2 , Issues, pro cons, feelings...

[latoxine]

So after 5 hours on it yesterday , my first impression, bad an good,  from someone who had a break with hardware synth or workstations for years, as I mainly played with VST's, Ominshpere.

Of course bad things will be longuer and more detailled, it's always like that but SPOILER ALERT : I enjoyed it a lot, forgott to drink and eat and only bed time stopped me playing!


BAD THINGS
I encounter few issues already mentionned here and there and on youtube.


-  I can live with that but in my case the encoder jump still present sometime, even if far far away from what it was. ( I cant' imagine how you guys did before the update ! A nightmare.)

- The sequencer play freeze, need to reboot : I've read here that it's when MULTIMODE is ON. Mine is ON, because I want to play a sequence and let it play while I'm playing on the second layer; Which is not possible if MULTIMODE is OFF, according to my quick test.

- A second calibration freezed after the one I did folowing the update. With pop crash noises, I had to turn it off and reboot to success; I haven't found any precise advise on it, I don't know if you have to put pots on a specific position, turned the master volume down etc. I did it my way.
I tried to do a second calibration because...

-...for me the output level is higher on my right monitor. I did some test, swap cables etc. I've seen that it's now  an automatic feature in the recent updates, that's why I tried twice the calibration but still no change. But I need to do more test.   

- A freeze single ghost note. After playing a factory sequence ( can't remenber the name right now ) a note remained.  Had to kill the poly with keys and/or play sequence. Note : I did not use midi yet, direct audio output on mixer.

- Not really an issue but as many others, when you want to try quickly a sequence with a sound who have a multi tracks sequence in it, record put rest, delete or whatever you call the way to proceed on all the tracks, on both layers before to be able to record is really not userfriendly. 


Now the good things, not technic :

- Look solid.

- Ok it's not the VST I mentionned above but sounds can be more complex than I expected. 

- 5 minutes and you ''create'' a sound. ( the best in the world of course ) I named it  July the 4th from the date I received it. I wonder if it's an important date somewhere...

- Inspiring sounds.  If you don't buy high end keyboards often, you will recover this pleasant feelings of discovering a new world of possibilities.

- Not specific to REV2 but the pleasure to interact directly, and quickly with your instrument, far far away from what you have with an VST even with a controller. 

- Sounds great, it breath.

- All the encoders and pots are your friends.

- Nice design.

- I don't know for mix yet, but it does what I expected from him :To be a pleasure live instrument. Or you play a sound, put an arp or a sequence on it, tweak few knobs, and 20/30 minutes later you are still on it with a smile on your face.  And you are in a trance. Because you are tired and starving.
 

[Razmo]

A few comments to your "bad things"...

The encoder skipping... it seems to have been eradicated with the last beta update to a point where I do not feel you can complain about it anymore... the worst quirk with this was that it often skipped two values with one click which was really irritating... but this is gone now... once in a while, the value do not advance at all, when you advance the encoder one click, but it happens so rarely that I can live with it.

Calibration... it's still a mystery how it works because DSI obviously do not want to answer the more technical questions about it that I've been giving on the forum... it quirky as hell to say the least... I can be almost certain on my REV2, that if I leave the REV on for half an hour (warm it up), and then perform the calibration, that it WILL FREEZE almost every single time I do this... if I then switch it off and on quickly and try again.. it will pass the calibration... I do not know why this is happening because the internal temperature can not have changed to make a difference from shutting the REV2 off for less than 5 seconds... for some reason the calibration seems to run thru best, if it's performed right after a power cycle or a just turned on machine... I suspect it's the calibration routine that has some bugs in it because it does this freeze in 99% of the cases on my REV2, and I've had two REV2s... both acted in exactly the same way.

The output volume is not different on my REV2... both speakers play at the same level... try and do the calibration again... I've had situations where I just calibrated my REV2, only to experience that one voices filter had been wrongly calibrated and was more than one semitone apart from the rest of the voices... a new calibration fixed that... you have to understand, that the calibration routine is not bulletproof for some reason... it makes wrong measurements in my experiences, from time to time. If you have big freezing problems, try holding the two transpose buttons down simultaneously, and at the same time press "global"... in the debug menu, the first option is to erase calibration data... do this, and then perform a new calibration... in most cases this will speed up the calibration for some obscure reason.

Ghost notes... the history of the OS updates are littered with "Better voice stability" statements... it was horrible to begin with, and I occationaly experience sudden strange behaviors from time to time, but they are so elusive they are impossible to pinpoint and do a bug report about... the REV2 still has voice stability issues, that is a simple fact, though mostly it works ok now... if you notice the way it's written in the OS update list it only says "improvement"... that alone should hint you, that it's not yet perfect (fixed), just "better".

The poly sequencer... you do not need to erase anything... when you press record, it just start from the beginning of the sequence, and the end is set to whatever step you stop recording on... initially I also thought that notes had to be erased bacause I could hear old notes playing ... but it is because you have to see the two layers on their own... I did NOT hear old notes, I was hearing the notes on layer B because I only recorded new ones on layer A... there is no way of recording to both layer  and B at the same time... I've asked DSI about implementing it, but I got the impression that this will not happen, even though it's the most logical way to record if you have a layered sound consisting of both layer A and B... you simply have to either record both, or copy a layers sequence to the other (there are features for this)... it would though, be very much more intuitive to have it record on both layers any time you are in stacked mode...

[Djinn]

I have that calibration problem as described to. Switch off/on usually sorts it.
Just to let u know ur not alone

[latoxine]

A few comments to your "bad things"...

The encoder skipping... it seems to have been eradicated with the last beta update to a point where I do not feel you can complain about it anymore...

Yes , I tried the synth for one hour before to update, and it's was horrible. A serious youtuber in France did a review of the rev2, in the global menu he skipped up to 3 or 4 pages, did not realise it was an issue,  and thought that it could be empty space reserved for future features !

The poly sequencer... you do not need to erase anything... when you press record, it just start from the beginning of the sequence, and the end is set to whatever step you stop recording on... initially I also thought that notes had to be erased bacause I could hear old notes playing ... but it is because you have to see the two layers on their own... I did NOT hear old notes, I was hearing the notes on layer B ...

lol, yes, I 've seen your post about it , we are not the only one I think ! You edit each notes, put rest etc...on each tracks, each steps again and again because you still have this f...g arp playing on your     And then you realise, or read that it's probaly from the second layer ! 




_For the calibration it's reassuring to read that it can fail sometime without being a big deal.


_On the other side I need you because I can't find anymore on the forum where is the procedure to test the voices/oscillators  and check if there are some possible issues ?  When I play repetitive notes of raw shapes on init preset , I have slightly different sounds, like if one note is phasing sometime.
But I'm not sure if it's normal or not...I remenber reading that if you hear a pulse, or a saw or whatever instead of the selected shape it's an issue, but I'm not sure to be able to do the difference to be honest !


 

[Sleep of Reason]

The poly sequencer... I've asked DSI about implementing it, but I got the impression that this will not happen

It's about as clear cut a mandatory implementation as it gets.

[osflaa]

I have only used soft synths before I bought the Rev2 a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I first bought the Korg Prologue and liked it a lot, however it had some serious issues with the VCOs. Occasionally, single notes were FAR out of tune (I am not talking about "charming" VCO-drifting here). I read on gearslutz that other people experienced this, too. Korg are impossible to contact, the support on their webpage and Facebook-site is only for US customers. I contacted them via the dealer but the only help I received was the standard "have you tried updating to the latest OS?", which of course was the first thing I did. So I returned it and found the Rev2 to be the only alternative to me.

I have used the Rev2 a couple of weeks now and like it a lot! The only issue I had was the encoder skipping values. I did not understand that it has an exponential response and is supposed to skip an increasing number of values for each step as I turn the encoder faster. If I turned it really slow it did not skip values. That said, I think it was way too sensitive and found it awkward to use. But the 1.1.4 OS solved this.

I miss a few features. However, I don't think I would buy the synth if there were many more knobs on the panel and the menus were longer. I wanted a synth that sounds good, is easy to understand and fast to use with direct access to all important parameters on the panel because I needed to boost my creativity and speed up my workflow. And already now I can say this has actually happened!  But I am really afraid this can be the start of an expensive adventure, I have already started looking at other synths, especially the OB-6 

[Gerry Havinga]

But I am really afraid this can be the start of an expensive adventure, I have already started looking at other synths, especially the OB-6 

Ha ha, indeed, welcome to the club of "no money and plenty of GAS".

Really nice to hear you like the Rev2 and you are sharing about it. Sorry to hear about the Korg disappointment.