There’s a special kind of respect that follows the legendary Jupiter-8. Rather than simple nostalgia, it’s a gravitational pull to one of the best synths of all time. The JP-8 defined how an instrument could behave, breathe, and disrupt – and it’s no wonder that the creators of some of the best analog emulators on the market are continuing to find inspiration in it.
Cherry Audio’s new Mercury-8, which arrived November 25 for an almost unreasonably low price of $69, steps directly into that lineage with the audacity not just to honor it, but to push it somewhere the original could never have gone. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is a JP-8 clone – this synth takes everything you love about the JP-8 and makes it ten times better.
Cherry Audio has been refining its Mercury series for years, but the Mercury-8 is the moment where the company plants its flag. The team has rebuilt the JP-8’s circuitry in software with an almost romantic meticulousness – every last quirk, curve, and drift has been accounted for, and taken further. Mercury-8 expands polyphony to a dual-layer, 16-voices-per-layer architecture that turns the old limits into new runway. The legendary Jupiter character is intact, but it now arrives with modern expressiveness, a highly flexible modulation matrix, and a full suite of studio-grade effects that would’ve required a small mortgage in 1981.
As to be expected from Cherry Audio, there’s a delightfully obsessive streak throughout: analog drift and condition controls to age the synth from factory-fresh to “held together by a prayer,” multi-voice micro-variation tools for building unstable, beautiful textures, and even data exchange compatibility with actual MIDI-modified JP-8 hardware. It’s the sort of feature that exists only because someone on the development team refused to take no for an answer.
Producers will appreciate the intuitiveness of this synth. The sequencer and arpeggiator are syncable, transposable, and humanizable. The three independent effect chains, featuring 20 and effects including new additions like DCO Chorus and Pulser, turn Mercury-8 into its own self-contained production environment. And the 600+ factory presets, including meticulous recreations of the original factory patches with enhanced versions, mean you can get lost immediately – in the best way possible.
To put it simply, Mercury-8 is what happens when a legendary instrument meets modern possibilities without losing its soul. For musicians and producers looking for the joy of analog with the freedom of today’s tools, Mercury-8 may very well be the peak of it.
The holidays are coming up, and we can guarantee that the producer in your life will be over the moon with this tool. Grab it today on its own for $69 or in a bundle here.
The post Cherry Audio Releases The Mercury-8; A Beautifully Faithful and Modernized Reinvention of the Jupiter-8 appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.