Man, not sure how to feel about this, in one hand the updates are great, but as others have said the business model for OG customers who purchased the original in under 1.5 years sure stings, $400 to update is abit much, $200 would have been an easier pill to swallow.
As for the updates, the inclusion of synth engines and usb audio are great additions, but if they were updating the Play, why haven’t they made some quality of life updates to the sample engine, like adding a full adsr envelope for samples, adding polyphony and additional sample playback engines?
and why on the Play+ do we still have to use use 3 or more tracks to record a chord? (if not using the pre-programmed chord list) Surely they can implement the ability to only use only a single midi/audio track for this, say you create 2 synth parts with 7th chords, thats all your midi tracks used up?
8 voices of polyphony for virtual analogue synths in 2023 is a tad stingy, the Novation Supernova/Nova had like 16 and 6 part multitimbral or the Nord Lead 2 had 20 and 4 part multitimbral back in the lates 90’s.
I’m not just having a go at Polyend for this, because Elektron are guilty for exactly the same, forced unnecessary restrictions on their gear.
The deluge’s polyphony is like 64 voices and was developed with whatever CPU they used back in 2016, I hope these areas can be improved upon giving the Play+ 5x CPU power of the OG.
Because the hardware and some of the concepts stand out, but the final product is a head scratcher.