I was trying to raise cash to buy an Alesis Andromeda, turned out the shop I was buying through sold the one I'd had a deposit on. I was plenty annoyed about that.
The Prophet 600 doesn't have the best reputation for stability, indeed mine was about as reliable as a plummer's estimate. It really depended on what happened when you turned it on if the controls would do anything. It's primitive processor was maybe a little bit under powered to track everything that was asked of it all the time. Not that it was much of a problem. I never played live with it. The sound of this thing is what I miss. I'd made a few typical "cars" patches and then hit upon one which was just awesome.
I've heard that a lot of people complain about the envelopes, but it never bothered me, even the "zipper" when using the filter cutoff had it's charms. Slightly more complicated than the Juno 60 on the front panel, but my favourite by far.
It was sort of an electric piano patch. I'd nailed the attack and release and there was this growly bottom end. The tone was almost acoustic. I loved it. Then one day the battery failed. All of my patches were gone!
Replacing the battery was easy, just a trip down to the local electronics dealer. Since I'd read about PCB's being destroyed by leaky batteries I moved the battery offboard and into the far coner of the synth where it could do no harm.
Alas all of my patches were gone for good. I never could get the right combo of sounds back.
That bummed out considerably, and may have resulted in me selling the synth. It eventually went to a guy in New Zealand where I last heard it was still working well and seeing some use in an actual band. Hopefully it lives a long life.
Specifications:
- Polyphony - 6 Voices
- Oscillators - VCO A saw / pulse / tri; VCO B saw / pulse / tri / PW
- LFO - pulse / tri
- Filter - cutoff / res / env / kybd
- VCA - ADSR
- Keyboard - 61 keys
- Arpeg/Seq - Sequencer: 2-track, real-time only; Arpeggiator: up, down, up/down
- Control - MIDI
- Date Produced - 1982
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