Cherry Audio DS-2

Cherry Audio’s take on the Crumar DS‑2 could be better than the original...

I don’t view Gordon’s Rules Of Synthesizer Design as particularly onerous. One of these is, ‘No integrated monosynth shall cause me to puff when I carry it up two flights of steps.’ Another is, ‘No synthesizer shall greet me with a cloud of mildew when I take the lid off after an extended period of storage.’ A third is, ‘No synthesizer shall have an immovable knob, even if it hasn’t been twiddled in a while.’ On all three counts, my Crumar DS‑2 failed miserably when I liberated it for this review. It occurred to me that there must be a better way to obtain its sounds and the experience of playing it.

Let’s get one thing clear; the Cherry Audio DS‑2 is not a slavish recreation of the strange combination of a dual‑oscillator monosynth and a basic paraphonic synth that is the Crumar DS‑2. In keeping with almost all modern soft synths, it offers far more than its inspiration. So, while Cherry’s engineers have modelled the unusual waveform generation and filtering that gave the Crumar its character, their version offers things such as an additional audio waveform, oscillator sync and the pitch contouring of osc 2 that makes it useful, a 12dB/oct filter mode, filter cutoff key follow (a big improvement), hugely enhanced contouring and modulation, programmable split/layer for the Synth and Poly sections, an arpeggiator, and a powerful effects section. Oh yes... and the main synthesizer voicing is now (up to) 16‑voice polyphonic when desired. If, in 1978, Crumar had tried to build in hardware what this offers in software, the result would have needed a shed for storage, a forklift truck to move it, and it would likely have had a mean time between failures shorter than an episode of Blake’s Seven.

Nonetheless, many early synths thrived on their limitations. So a good question to ask (in addition to ‘does it sound any good?’) is whether the numerous enhancements have turned the Cherry DS‑2 into just another all‑singing, all‑dancing polysynth that overlaps the myriad Prophet‑y, Oberheim‑y, Roland‑y, Korg‑y and even Moog‑y soft synths you already have. Alternatively, does it bring something new or special to your synthesizer party?