Cherry Audio launches official ESQ-1 plugin for 40th anniversary

Cherry Audio used the ESQ-1’s 40th anniversary for something better than a nostalgia exercise: an officially licensed revival of one of the most distinctive hybrid synths of 1986. The new plugin arrived through Creative Technology, the current owner of the Ensoniq intellectual property, which makes this more than another retro-flavored softsynth. It is a sanctioned return to the ESQ-1’s original idea, and Cherry Audio priced it at $69.

That original idea still carries weight because the ESQ-1 was never just a cheap keyboard with digital waveforms. It paired 32 waveforms with an analog low-pass filter, and Cherry Audio rebuilt that architecture around the Curtis CEM3379 filter, four DCAs, four multi-stage envelopes, and three LFOs. The company also reproduced amplitude modulation and oscillator sync behavior, then gave the whole instrument a modern software front end that can finally show the signal path without the ESQ-1’s cramped hardware display.

The practical payoff is patch interchange. Cherry Audio said the plugin can import original ESQ-1 SysEx data directly from hardware over MIDI or from SysEx files, including cartridge dumps, third-party libraries, and decades of user-created sounds. It can also export SysEx patch files compatible with the original machine, which is the detail that gives this release real utility for owners who still keep an ESQ-1 in the studio. For players who know how much of the instrument’s character lived in its factory banks and user-programmed oddities, that matters as much as the oscillators themselves.

Cherry Audio packed the software with more room than the hardware ever had. The interface is laid out across Play, Edit, Modulation, Envelopes, and Sequencer pages, and the instrument adds dual-layer stereo operation, up to 32 voices per layer, split and stacked modes, a deep modulation matrix, MPE and poly aftertouch support, a built-in arpeggiator, a 16x4 polyphonic step sequencer, and 20 onboard effects. Cherry Audio documented three separate effects chains, one for Layer 1, one for Layer 2, and one global chain for the combined signal, and the release shipped with over 400 presets mixing factory sounds with new patches.

That combination of official licensing and careful recreation is what makes this launch land. The ESQ-1 earned its cult status as an affordable hybrid with real personality, not as a museum piece, and Cherry Audio clearly understood that the appeal was always the wavetable-plus-analog-filter identity. Four decades later, that is still the part worth preserving.