i recently bought arturia's prophet-v, a plugin suite containing emulations of both the sequential circuits prophet5 and prophet-vs. i mainly bought it for the virtual prophet-vs, but the software prophet5 is a nice bonus.

i already own native instruments' pro-53, another prophet5 emulation, so in order to keep my toolbox as clean as possible, i wanted to find out which would be my go-to prophet5 emulation. searching the internets didn't result in any clear general accepted opinion about the two plugins, so i ran a few tests and decided to publish them here. hopefully, the next person asking google the question that is the title of this post, ends up here and finds an answer of use.

meanwhile, in a parallel universe called photoshop

keep in mind that this isn't an in-depth review or that i'll finally reveal which emulation comes closest to the original. i just hope to make clear what sets the emulations apart sonically. because while quite similar in character, they sound quite different.

i played around with both plugins and ended up with these 2 examples, which for me quite clearly demonstrate the difference. to get roughly identical sounds, i started by setting the knobs in the same position and then tweak by ear.

that's an arp starting with 4 rounds of pro53, then 4 of prophet-v, 4 more of both, and then 2 rounds of each alternating.

that's 4 bars pro-53, 4 bars prophet-v, 4 bars of each again and then 1 bar of each alternating.

to my ears, arturia's emulation is not as buzzy as native instruments'. it sounds cleaner and at times even has a glass-like quality. i would describe its sound as 'pointy' and controlled. the pro-53 has a bit more balls, but it also sounds blurrier. as a consequence, i think it would be easier to make arturia's prophet5 stand out in a mix. but if you're after a ballsy sound, pro-53 might be a better choice.

overall, the pro-53 sounds good to me, and i wouldn't be surprised if most people like it better because it seems to sound phatter. maybe the pro-53 also comes closer to the original. i'm not in a position to judge that, but i've played with the sequential circuits pro-one, and that's one mean little monster. so maybe the original prophet5 sounds fuzzier than arturia wants us to believe.

but in my opinion, the pro-53 somehow has an edge that reminds me of softsynths i've heard before. besides the impression that arturia are more dedicated to making emulations than native instruments, arturia's emulation simply sounds more unique to me. combined with the fact that i generally prefer cleaner sounds, it gotz 2b the prophet-v fo' me.

that means doing without the nice things that native instruments added to their emulation: velocity sensitivity, a highpass filter and the possibility to inverse the filter envelope. the prophet-v allows you to set up similar things in hybrid mode, where you combine the prophet5 and the prophet-vs into one big instrument, but it's just not as straightforward. and i found the range of the velocity sensitivity to be far too small to play sounds expressively. hopefully this will be fixed in arturia's upcoming summer update.