Recently Korg released their take on the perennial ARP2600 in VST/plugin format.
Now it appears that there are plenty of takes these days on the ARP, but as Korg have done some work with a hardware version they *should* make a decent take on it, don’t ya think? Well this review has been a while coming because, well, the initial versions were pretty bad. Even V1.0.6 which is the current version as of today still needs a serious computer to run well, and the cpu useage is too high for it to be a really good plugin. Coupled with the need for a gpu/grahics card with decent opengl performance on Windows, and well the first couple of version I tested were awful. You could only really use this one plugin in a DAW or maybe a couple if you ran standalone, but this was on a Ryzen 2700 pc with 32 gig ram, and I know there is a large percentage of people who don’t have anywhere near that level of performance. I don’t have an Apple machine to test on, so maybe this was a Windows specific issue but I have to say this was pretty much a deal breaker for me with the initial versions. I even saw that hacking crews made lite versions that ran better because the issues were so severe. None of the other reviews I saw (well reviews as all were sponsored in some way shape or form) mentioned this, so it does bring about the argument about reviews these days (rant 2024 reviews are awful as they are all sponsored these days)
With the release of V1.0.6 of the plugin recently, some of the demo patches included at least began to be more useable and the whole plugin started to use a lot less resources. Even so, it is really easy to get a patch that uses 50% cpu in Ableton 12 on it’s own with spikes up to 80%. This is such a shame, but if you turn off some of the included fx and use your own, the cpu useage drops considerably. This shows that further improvements should be coming if Korg choose to do so. However this plugin currently costs $149 and to be honest, I’d like a better performing plugin for that amount of money. Come on Korg – you can and should do better! So with that in mind, I really can’t recommend this right now. Better performing alternatives exist I’d look at the Arturia and Cherry Audio versions for starters…. but I do have to say that this version does sound great. Some nice presets, but as I have said before we seem to have a glut of similar plugins these days. Plenty of MiniMoog/CS80/Prophet-5 plugins about, and I’d really like to see some original and/or different plugins come out. The reviews and posts on this site are meant to be short and punchy, not massively in depth, so that really is about it for this review. In summary – OK, too expensive, too inefficient but sounds good. For me though – it’s a miss not a hit. Upgrade options so far are also too expensive, but that could of course change…
Korg ARP2600 plugin
The Korg version of the ARP2600 is here in plugin form. Could and should be so much better, but I hope that newer versions deal with the issues. As it stands though it is too expensive and it needs way too powerful hardware to do it justice!
Pros
Sounds great if you can use it
Good stability in new version
Korg usually update quickly and well
Cons
Price is high, upgrades expensive
Performance issues ruin it
Yet another old analogue clone/reproduction
[…] My review is HERE […]