Open Box. Shop Soiled. Ex-Demo. Somebody Wiped Their Ass On This. OK maybe the last is an exaggeration but you can be sure one person scratched their pimples before fiddling with the sliders in some showroom in Melbourne. So it becomes cheap, and you get what you get and don’t get upset.
The Behringer clone is already cheap when new. The original is about $12,000USD or more in the USA. The mini Korg version maybe $2000AUS. I managed $740AUS by going for the earliest model with Xmas lights and ‘open box’. Apparently I’m also missing out on a real spring reverb. Fuck woo. If I really respected the unit I’d be going for the Korg version, but I needed to rack it and I’ve never really been that excited by ARP anything. Sometimes I am even a bit rude.
So why at all then?
Here you can see some of my (loose) pile of mono things, increasingly Behringer. The Expander and Pro-1 are in the middle, with the ARP up top to provide a bevy of oscillators, ring mod, LFO etc. to the common cause. Like the Korg MS50 to the left it’s able to provide a voice in itself, but it comes handy in providing a bit more of everything to the others. (The Wasp is just fluttering around.)
It’s a bit harsh to blandly say ‘a voice’ but I really don’t see the ARP as having the same distinction as the Pro-1 or Expander. You can’t miss their particular vocal style. They are different. The ARP not so much.
This 8 rack unit is heavy. Not like Ensoniq heavy but there’s a lot of guts in there. It’s pretty solidly built, while mine is missing a fair few of the little rubber plugs that guard the adjustment screws. The Xmas lights can be quite shockingly bright but I disagree that they were a bad idea, just that the colour code is a little obscure.
The patching surface is idiosyncratic and needs a few hours of wiggling to get the flow worked out. Vertical sliders just aren’t visually helpful, I mean they do keep the control surface tight but they don’t illustrate the left to right flow in a glance. The sliders are also a little extra small on this miniaturised version. The pitch settings being completely slippery/sliding with no octaves just feels half-arsed, especially having to use another synthesiser (like the Korg) as a tuning reference. Later synthesisers were more effectively laid out.
But the main issue is that the real or remade ARP 2600 doesn’t have a strong spirit, a taste, identity. I’m sure that as I torture it I’m going to get some great moments to sample. But it’s not like the MS20 or even the Wasp, where you could pick it out from a sonic line up. It does general 70’s synthesiser blurps, which was exciting back in the 70’s, and that is that. If you need a big pizza with the lot this is a good deal. But many modern digital synthesisers have just as many elements (often more), are polyphonic and have their own sound. Buy the shop soiled one.
Hello Tom, another great review. I think your description is 100% accurate. The legends surrounding the synthesizer are now being put into perspective somewhat. It sounds really nice but also somehow “neutral”? I always expected something mystical, unbridled and perhaps expected too much from the 2600 sound. Whether an original or the Korg mini doesn’t differ for that special something…? For the price, it’s an unbeatably good and interesting synthesizer. And really a lot of patch points. “Hapeau” Behringer for the price…
…”Chapeau” ..Behringer…