Most producers chasing vintage polysynth character know the usual suspects: the Prophet-5, the Jupiter-8, the Juno. The Gleeman Pentaphonic isn't one of them, and that's exactly the point. It's a synth so obscure that even seasoned collectors have rarely touched a real one. Cherry Audio just made it possible to use one for the price of a club ticket.
Why does a synth nobody's heard of matter?
The original Pentaphonic was built in 1981 by brothers Bob and Al Gleeman, working out of a Silicon Valley garage rather than a factory floor. They engineered it to stay in tune under hot stage lighting, a real problem for touring analog synths of the era, and priced it to undercut the big-name polysynths it was competing against. It never caught on at scale: fewer than 70 units were ever produced, and most of those are now locked away in private collections, if they still work at all.
What made it worth remembering decades later is the engine under the hood. Five voices ran through a pair of Intel microprocessors driving digitally controlled oscillators into Curtis CEM 3320 four-pole filters, a combination that gives DCO-based synths their own gritty, slightly unstable warmth compared to a fully analog oscillator. That tension between digital pitch stability and analog filter grit is exactly the kind of character house and techno producers hunt down when a plugin's default presets start sounding too clean.
What does the plugin add that the 1981 hardware never had?
Cherry Audio didn't just clone the Pentaphonic, it stretched it. Polyphony jumps from the original's fixed five voices to a range of 2 to 16, with unison and mono modes layered on top, meaning the same oscillator character that once maxed out at five notes can now stack into dense unison basses or wide pad chords. The emulated CEM 3320 filter gets a second mode alongside the original 4-pole response, and a second LFO joins the one the hardware shipped with.
On top of that core engine sits a 16x4 polyphonic step sequencer, a syncable arpeggiator and a chain of 22 effects, tools the original Gleeman never had room for. With 375-plus presets included, it's built as much for producers who want fast, usable sounds as for the handful of people who actually know what a Pentaphonic Clear, the transparent plexiglas variant Gleeman built on request, looked like in the flesh.
Fewer than 70 units of the original hardware were ever produced, making it one of the rarest synthesizers ever built.
Why it matters
This is what keeps software synth companies digging through obscure 1980s catalogs: there's a long tail of DCO and hybrid designs with genuinely unique filter and oscillator behavior that never got the Prophet or Jupiter treatment, and producers who've worn out the usual vintage emulations are increasingly hunting for exactly this kind of unfamiliar texture.
What we think
The real story here isn't the plugin, it's the archaeology. Cherry Audio keeps finding synths that were commercial footnotes but sonic curiosities, and turning them into tools regular producers can actually use. At $59, this is a cheap way to add a filter and oscillator flavor almost nobody else in house and techno has in their crate.
