Waldorf has introduced Microwave plugin, a virtual instrument based on the original hardware Microwave from 1989.
The original is a classic hybrid design, combining wavetable oscillators and analog filters. It’s a rackmount module that built on the company’s PPG legacy.
Now Waldorf has brought the instrument back as a virtual instrument, and they say it has been “painstakingly recreated from the original hardware with all its idiosyncrasies and wonderful singularities”. But it also goes beyond the original, and features a user interface that’s much easier to program.
Here’s what they have to say about it:
“A multi-year effort and a labor of love which analyzed and modeled the original instruments down to the finest sonic details of every aspect of the hardware. Only the first generation of the Microwave and also the Waldorf Wave were based on a custom developed integrated circuit called the Waldorf ASIC. In combination with the legendary Curtis filter chips and a very unique 68k CPU based controller software the ASIC defined a very special flavor of wavetable sound unparalleled to none. No one else than the inventor of Wavetable Synthesis of the eighties, Wolfgang Palm, helped to design this unique chip.
Waldorf took a huge effort to analyze and recreate this integrated circuit within the plug-in. As the original, the plug-in runs the internal synthesis with the ultra high sampling rate of 250 kHz regardless of the DAW sampling rate. The recreated digital waveforms have been bit-by-bit compared with the original to be 100% identical.
Even the old-school digital-to-analogue converters of the original hardware were modeled with their non-linearities and tone shaping color which were leading into the two Curtis filter chips variants used for the revisions A and B of the original hardware. The plug-in allows further for artificially detuning and recalibrating of the analogue components. Brutal attacks, snappy decays and a plethora of wonderful transients define the sound of the first generation Microwave.
But the Microwave 1 Plug-In goes one step further: Its modern and inviting graphical user-interface reveals many aspects of the synthesis engine which were hidden before in the original hardware by its sparse hard to use interface.”
New features include:
- A fully scalable modern interface with readable high-contrast fonts
- Users can now easily edit existing wavetables and create new ones
- Additional randomization modes make wavetable editing fun and “sonically surprising”
- The plug-in UI allows now for quickly layering of single sounds to create the most complex and exciting sonic structures.
- Even the more exotic feature like tuning and velocity tables have been implemented and can be edited in the UI.
- Original MIDI and Sys-Ex dump files can be imported
- Moreover, the plug-in can be used to control the original hardware are a graphical editor.
- The Microwave 1 plug-in comes as VST, VST3, AU and AAX for macOS and Windows supporting the major digital audio workstations.
Pricing and Availability:
The Microwave 1 plug-in is available now with an intro price of €119,00 EUR (normally €149,00 EUR).
Sounds good to me but need a decent browser.
Nice Demo:
https://youtu.be/tZv2aWCbDHI
Yes, if it weren’t for the fact that I have gone reverse, i.e. completely DAWless and already have a Waldorf M.
Why not just use Xenia by the Usual Suspects?
Not the same synth.
Just to be clear: The DSP56300 “Xenia” project emulates the Microwave II/Microwave XT hardware. It has nothing to do with the first generation Microwave hardware that Waldorf emulated in this new plugin. Hence comparing the two plugins is not really meaningful because the original hardware units had completely different architectures.
Speaking as an owner of an original Microwave and a Microwave XT.
Still no linux version 🙁
I know you love Linux and think it’s the greatest ever and Mac and Windows suck 🙂 (it’s one of those “how can you tell if someone is a vegan?” things), but ribbing aside, the reason devs don’t release Linux versions of music titles is because the user base is far too small to make it worth their effort. Even if they’re using dev tools that make it relatively easy to compile for Linux, it’s still a loser on the support side (i.e. the cost of providing support for a niche format outweighs any profits they’d make).
false, plugins are easily cross-compilable…its only a question of will
Just got it. It sounds really, really good. However, 120 euros for 93 mb it is kind of excessive to me.
Hmmm. So you would rather it weighed in at 2.5Gb so you felt like you got your moneys worth?
Hmmmm. I rather prefer to weight ‘passive-aggressive’ comments from people who can not understand the meaning of ‘for me’ and get paid for it. At this point people like you would’ve made me rich Larry….but since I don’t get paid….i pay you back with a thank you for reading my comment dude
You said “to me” and not “for me”. That makes its meaning different to me. Now you have been paid twice over for my patronage.
The Prophet-5 Rev 3 firmware was crammed into 3 kilobytes of EPROM. It carried a list price of $4,595. That’s $1.70 per byte, making this VST an absolute bargain in comparison.
Plus I bet ALL of the data (ROM, EEPROM, etc.) on the original Microwave would easily fit on a single floppy disk.
Size of a program does not equal time, cost & effort of development. Honestly I’m impressed when a new program isn’t full of bloated & legacy coding.
Often small program size means the devs have found some elegant solutions & have properly optimised their code.
It sounds MUCH better than the Usual Suspect release. To get technical: it’s beefier and snappier. It sounds great out of the box – even without FX. The interface is well laid out and although I haven’t got into the ‘extras” yet. It’s just a great synth. I did own an MW1 many years ago and from memory – this sounds better.
The Microwave XT is a totally different synth.
Usual Suspects just emulates the DSP, so whatever you’re hearing is 100% Waldorf.
The Usual Suspects stuff is still only an emulation of the MW II/XT, not the MW 1 which isn’t DSP based at all. That makes the sonic difference.
They do indeed emulate more than the DSP Chip, since otherwise you would not be able to hear anything and you could not control it. Just look at their code, in addition to the DSP Chip itself, they do emulate in another layer the hardware of Waldorf, Access, Nord etc.
I do not know if this is a legal issue, but the lingo “We just emulate the DSP Chip” is non-sense and just a nice excuse. The EPROM firmware would not be able to run and make sound without a complete emulation of the specific instrument.
It’s nonetheless an interesting project, but has nothing to do with the Waldorf Microwave 1 Plug-In. In all fairness that should be mentioned.
If emulating hardware was illegal, the Apple M-series processors would be unable to run Intel binaries.
The comparison is not legitimate. The first generation Microwave hardware was a hybrid digital/analog engine with two revisions on the analog side. This is what the new Waldorf plugin emulates. The second generation Microwave II/Microwave XT was all digital. This is what the DSP56300 emulates.
I love this VST more than life itself
You can be sure the Apple has licensed this from Intel. But I fear that usual suspects haven’t licensed anything. Even NXP/Motorola could come over since CPU instruction sets are normally licensed too. ARM does nothing else. But surely NXP doesn’t care about Synth plug-ins.