GAK appear to have accidentally leaked the new V Collection:
What’s new in V Collection 9?
4 new instruments: Korg MS-20 V, SQ80 V, Augmented STRINGS, and Augmented VOICES
Prophet-5 V & Prophet-VS V: now 2 individual instruments that were previously a combined hybrid instrument, totally rebuilt from scratch with next-gen modelling
CS-80 V rebuild: a brand new sound engine with totally rebuilt DSP modelling, advanced modulation, voice dispersion, and a modernised advanced panel.
Piano V rebuild: a brand new physical modelling instrument, now featuring 12 piano models, from Japanese Grand to Piano Bar Upright, and advanced sound design controls
A CS-80 update with their fourth-gen DSP is exactly what I was hoping for. If the a la carte upgrade is priced like they have been in the past, I’m not even going to install the demo first.
Really wish they didn’t. Mixing sampled instruments with a software bundle is unnecessary and unwanted for me, just raising the price on the bundle, as implied added value. Wish they would make a separate bundle for all future Augmented/Sampled stuff they come up with in the future. I have the same issue with Native Instruments, as they keep adding more stupid levels to their Komplete bundle when I just want to buy in to the software development, not the sampling.
Why does it matter? I can’t vote with my wallet if they don’t sell just a software bundle. The more sales they have of V9, the more they spend on recording sessions, all sorts of related expenses that would otherwise go to engineering time and talent. The sampling products deserve to exist, but should be funded separately from the software development (and hardware and physical modeling).
Its also thematically weird to add the Augmented products to the V collection, as all V products are models of existing/famous hardware (and pianos). Augmented is brand new stuff. There’s a reason Pigments isn’t in the V collection bundle. This bothers me more than it should, ugh.
FX collection has brand new effects, sure, but again it’s funding software development. I fear a rabbit hole of sampling products getting added that I don’t want to financially support and don’t have a need for.
Exactly. The process whereby Spark was discontinued made sense in that it reinforced the focus of the collection on recreating and reinterpreting classic gear, and they’ve done an incredible job of it with each new version. It seems really odd to reverse course on that now.
The other thematic problem with Augmented is that Arturia has built the V Collection’s name on procedural everything, down to some of the most revered piano physical modeling on the market. I remember the reviews of Piano V2 marveling at the fact that no samples were involved – and now here’s V Collection 9 with gigabytes of samples?
I mean, sure, it’s not like there weren’t samples already with the likes of Fairlight and Emulator, but those existed in service of modeled hardware, down to ancient DACs for them to play through. This is more along the lines of Kontakt libraries with Arturia patch management instead of NI’s (which… actually sounds like a good thing, but I digress).
All this is not to dismiss the Augmented series, which I’m sure will sound great, but I really wish Arturia had gone the route of an Augmented Collection rather than duct-taping it onto the V Collection. They could have even started with a “Sample Libraries You’ll Actually Use” before promoting it to the Augmented Collection after adding a few more instruments.
Then again, maybe that’s the long-term plan, and Augmented will split off with V Collection 10, shoehorning it into 9 having merely been the most expedient way to ramp up adoption of Arturia’s sample business.
You’re right. I would say “I’d recognize that filter anywhere,” although between other VA models and hardware clones, I’ve probably heard more copies of it than the original at this point!
So far I don’t see a need to upgrade. The real stars are Jun-6/OB-Xa/DX-7 so far. What you have is a good product. Upgrades are not that bad but not sure what this one is going to be. Enjoy your current kit
Unless the samples are that much better I would keep what you have. Piano/Rhodes are not the strong suite of the collection. Unless this new update is competitive with Keyscape I’d have a hard time justifying the upgrade other than the Korg/Strings/Voices
For Black Friday the upgrade to V7 was $99. Not sure about the path to V8.
That one does sound amazing, but as far as I know, there‘s no Mac version of the ME80, so in that sense there’s an opening there. But I agree, $40 for that quality of a plugin is sort of unbeatable.
