Preview: Arturia Origin

Arturia is a small company from the southern, nether regions of France – Grenoble, to be precise, nestled in the foothills of the Alps.

If you’re a user of any of Arturia’s analogue soft synths you’ll no doubt be aware of the company’s obsession with faithful analogue emulation. The Moog Modular-V, CS-80V and Jupiter 8-V (to name a few) are all stunning mimics of the original synths. What fewer people have been aware of (though not many) is that, for some years now, Arturia has been hatching plans for a hardware synth.

If you weren’t aware of the impending release of the Origin then, as an Arturia soft synth user, you might have noticed a slowdown in what you can loosely call ‘support’ – the Jupiter8-V, for example, took quite some time to really hit its straps. But now the Origin is actually here, in the flesh, all is forgiven – clearly Arturia has poured its heart and soul into the design of its first hardware offering.

I recently had the pleasure of witnessing one of the first fully-fledged Origins – serial  No. 002 in fact.

REAL EMULATION

Much of the secret behind Arturia’s emulation smarts is its TAE technology, an acronym for ‘True Analogue Emulation’. This emulation system has become a benchmark in the virtual instrument world. With the Origin, this technology obviously cannot use the processor of the host computer but neither is the Origin simply a cut down PC-in-a-box masquerading as a synth. The Origin uses dedicated DSP processors in the form of two Analog Devices TigerSHARC chips. It’s a formidable processor, capable of executing 3.6 billion 32-bit floating point operations a second – and the Origin has two.

Having a huge investment in the development of virtual synths, the Origin not surprisingly features oscillators and filters from Arturia’s stable of soft synths. The menu of sound sources includes: the Minimoog, CS-80, ARP Odyssey, Roland Jupiter 8, along with the facility for wavetable synthesis and the Origin’s own oscillators. The available filters include emulations from the Jupiter-8, Minimoog, ARP and CS-80, again with filters specific to the Origin alongside the vintage recreations. The primary attraction of the Origin architecture is that all these oscillators and filtering models can be melded into single (massive) patches – it’s like having all of the aforementioned machines squashed into one box. Sure, you may be able to cobble all this together using the software versions of these synths in your DAW but it’s not going to be fun, and it’ll bring your DAW to a grinding halt faster than sand in a crankshaft.

Physically, the Origin is a desktop device, although there is a keyboard model slated for release sometime during early 2009. The desktop model I auditioned is due out this October (hopefully by the time you’re reading this). The unit is graced with 52 knobs dedicated to particular functions, with eight of those relegated to patch-specific performance parameters. Assigning a parameter to one of the performance pots is an easy ‘one-touch’ affair. There’s also a joystick for parameter morphing, Prophet VS-style vector sequencing, or as a simple mod source. There’s been no skimping on I/O either, with 10 pairs of main left and right outputs and a generous eight mono outputs. There’s also a coax S/PDIF output, which I can only assume is a mirror of the stereo output at this stage, since the demo model was unfortunately lacking documentation.