Vintage recreation
Building a new instrument whose selling point is an old one. It runs as a spectrum, and where a product sits on it says more about the maker than the specs do.
- Part-for-part recreation. Copy the circuit, keep the price. miltone-4exp remakes the 1975 Oberheim Four Voice at €9,990–11,990, hand-built and numbered, by a shop whose day job is repairing the originals. The claim is fidelity; the buyer is someone who wants the 1975 instrument and can't have one.
- Budget clone. Copy the idea, delete the price. behringer-cs-mini renders the Yamaha CS-80 as a ~$99 mini and pays for it in architecture — three paraphonic voices through a shared filter path where the original was fully polyphonic and per-voice. The claim is access.
- Homage / spec-lift. Take the famous architecture, drop the enclosure and the badge. ouranos7 and m-vave-fm-1 both rebuild the Yamaha DX7 spec (six operators, 32 algorithms) — one as free software, one as a ~$75 pocket box. minichord does the same for the Omnichord.
- Software emulation. The circuit as DSP, where the argument becomes the analog-vs-digital one.
- Firmware emulation (added 2026-09-09). Not a copy of anything. Simulate the instrument's processor and sound chips, then boot its original ROM and let the machine's own code run. VES does this for ~45 instruments through an embedded MAME. For a digital instrument the result is not an approximation at all, which is why this rung breaks the pattern below rather than extending it.
Two things are worth keeping straight. First, what's being reproduced differs at every rung: the circuit, the sound, the architecture, the interface, or the machine itself, and marketing calls all of them "recreation." Second, cheapness and fidelity trade against each other directly across the first four rungs: every price cut in that part of the list is paid for in voice architecture, and the one product that refuses the compromise (miltone-4exp) also refuses the discount.
The last rung is where that trade stops holding. firmware-emulation is cheap and exact, because it reproduces neither the circuit nor the sound but the computation, and for an instrument whose voice was already digital the computation is the whole of it. It pays in a different currency: the emulator is free and the copyrighted firmware it needs is the user's problem, and the fidelity is inherited from an upstream driver nobody in the transaction controls.
And the two ends want different decades. Everything above the last rung rebuilds analog polysynths from 1975–1983; VES's ~45 machines are overwhelmingly digital instruments from 1983–1995 — FM, phase distortion, PCM, samplers, drum machines. The technique picks the era, not the taste.
The through-line to the rest of the spoke is that the instruments people want rebuilt are almost all analog polysynths from 1975–1983 that were expensive then and are unobtainable now. Recreation is what happens when a design outlives its manufacturability, and both poles here — €10k archival copy and $99 approximation — are answers to the same shortage.
Related
miltone-4exp · behringer-cs-mini · analog-vs-digital · synthesizer · ouranos7 · m-vave-fm-1 · minichord · behringer · oberheim · firmware-emulation · vintage-emulator-studio · mame