Acustica Audio Expanse-5: Is This Prophet-5 Emulation the Best Yet?
Everything is over-sampled!
1,3 / 5,0 | 
Acustica Audio is back with Expanse-5, its latest software synthesizer. Do we really need another Prophet-5 emulation though?
Acustica Audio Expanse-5
Acustica Audio has been killing it with its soft synths. The company may be best known for effects and mixing plugins, but the last six months or so have seen Acustica releasing instruments, like Thing-8 and Alice-9. Now it’s back with Expanse-5, with all signs indicating that it’s a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 emulation.
Convolution Plus Virtual Analog
As with the first two synths, this new emulation is part of Acustica Audio’s Marea line of virtual instruments. The new instrument – also called XP-5 in the promotional materials – is powered by the company’s proprietary Modular Unified Synthesis Technology, or MUST. This integrates analog circuit behavior modeling with the company’s signature convolution-based approach. If you’ve heard Thing-8 or Alice-9, you know how good this can sound.
Along with MUST, Expanse-5 also features extensive oversampling. In fact, it reportedly runs entirely at oversample rate. This leads to, in the words of the company, extreme detail and transients, clean modulation and PWM, and consistent phase behavior.
Beyond the 5
If you’re not familiar with the original Prophet-5, Sequential Circuits’ groundbreaking instrument was a dual-oscillator, five-voice poly synth with digital programmable patch memory (a world first) plus a polymod section for unique synthesis textures.
Expanse-5 can do everything the original can, plus adds scalable polyphony (from two to 10 voices, with more possibly coming in the future depending on interest), superstereo and age controls, a sub oscillator, effects such as saturation, chorus, delay and reverb pulled from other Acustica Audio plugins, and integrated OTT-style compression.
Price and Availability
Expanse-5 looks like another winner from Acustica Audio, with many people on forums praising it for its sound quality. There are no real demo videos yet (just a movie trailer-style AI one), but there’s a 30-day trial. Hopefully, we’ll see a cut-down free version soon, like Acustica did with Thing.
The plugin is available now at an introductory price of €99. That will go up to €169 on July 14.
More Information
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3 responses to “Acustica Audio Expanse-5: Is This Prophet-5 Emulation the Best Yet?”
They are called “Acustica Audio” because “Worse Programmers on the Planet” was already taken.
I genuinely don’t know how they stay in business. I suppose all you have to do is to have a realistic looking UI to fool people.
Downloaded the demo. Great looking UI but terrible sounding plugin. Does not sound like a Prophet, it sounds like sterile brittle and shrilly. Uhe, and Arturia still win the Prophet plugin thing.