Waldorf’s Microwave 1 Plugin was already a notable act of preservation when it launched — a multi-year effort to model the original rack-mount hybrid wavetable synth down to the finest sonic details of its hardware, idiosyncrasies included, rather than smoothing them into a generic modern wavetable engine. Version 2, released at the end of June, keeps that character intact while addressing the plugin’s most practical limitation.
Watch: Waldorf Microwave 1 Plugin — First Look & Sound Demo (YouTube)
What actually changed
By emulating additional voice cards, V2 lifts polyphony from 8 voices to 32 — a four-fold increase — while specifically preserving the micro-timing and per-voice variation that gave the original hardware its character, rather than treating polyphony expansion as an excuse to clean up those inconsistencies. Alongside the polyphony jump, V2 adds dual arpeggiators and a new delay effect. Existing Microwave 1 owners get a free 1.3.0 update with a redesigned preset browser, multi-level undo/redo, and multi-part editing, while V2 itself is a paid upgrade priced at €99/$119.59 through early July before returning to its regular €149/$179.99.
Why keeping the quirks intact is the harder engineering choice
Expanding polyphony on an emulated instrument is, in the abstract, a matter of running more voice instances in parallel — the actual difficulty is doing that without quietly averaging away the specific per-voice inconsistencies that were the point of modeling real hardware in the first place. A wavetable synth’s hybrid character, in Waldorf’s original hardware, came partly from voice cards that behaved slightly differently from each other; a plugin that scales up polyphony by treating every voice as an identical clone would technically hit 32 voices while losing the exact thing that made the original worth painstakingly recreating.
Why this matters beyond one synth revival
This lands in the same year as UVI’s 300-synth Synth Anthology 5 and Korg’s DIY NTS-4 mixer, both covered here previously — different approaches to the same broader trend of software increasingly standing in for, or extending, specific pieces of hardware history rather than offering only generic modern synthesis. Waldorf’s version is the most narrowly focused of the three: one specific, well-loved synth, modeled and then genuinely expanded rather than just archived, which is a higher bar than most hardware-emulation plugins bother clearing.