Cherry Audio GX-80 Review: CS-80 and GX-1 in One Plugin

May 15, 2025

Two Yamaha Legends, One Plugin

A working Yamaha CS-80 is heavy, temperamental and priced like a classic car. The GX-1 that came before it is rarer still, with fewer than ten ever built. Cherry Audio's GX-80 takes both, combines them, and asks for a slice of your CPU instead.

It's a big, deep instrument, and it does the Vangelis thing very well. Whether you'll ever get to the bottom of it is another matter.

What It Is

The CS-80 arrived in 1977: eight voices, two complete synth layers per voice, polyphonic aftertouch and a ribbon controller for pitch bends. It's the sound of Blade Runner. The GX-1 was Yamaha's earlier flagship, a huge organ-style instrument from the mid-70s that supplied the technology the CS series was built on. Stevie Wonder, Keith Emerson and ABBA all used one.

GX-80 keeps the CS-80's structure and adds GX-1 features, mostly in the filters, marked in orange on the panel. It runs as a plugin or standalone.

Cherry Audio GX-80 voice rank and filter controls

The Sound and the Architecture

There are two layers, each with 16 voices, played stacked or split across the keyboard. The voice is built from four polyphonic ranks, and each rank has its own oscillator, resonant highpass and lowpass filters, noise, a sine wave, two envelopes and a velocity-sensitive VCA. The ranks can be panned independently, which is where the width comes from. You can switch between the CS-80 and GX-1 filter models, and there's the CS ring modulator, a sub-oscillator LFO per layer with tempo sync, and portamento and glissando.

It sounds enormous. Brass swells open slowly with the highpass and lowpass working together, pads are rich and moving, and the stereo spread across ranks makes a single patch fill a mix on its own. That's a strength and a warning: leave room for it, or it'll swallow everything in the same range.

What It's Good At

Expression. GX-80 supports both polyphonic and monophonic aftertouch, and has a last-note priority mode that fakes polyphonic aftertouch on a normal keyboard by applying pressure only to the most recent note. Brass that brightens as you lean into the keys is the CS-80's signature, and it works here. The virtual ribbon is modelled on the original, so the Blade Runner pitch swoops are a mouse drag away.

The effects are per layer or global: chorus/rotary, flange/phaser, digital or tape delay with sync, and reverb based on Cherry Audio's Galactic algorithm. There's also the tone selector with the original CS-80 factory voices, and over 1,000 presets on top. Focus mode zooms in on a section of the panel, which helps a lot on a laptop.

Cherry Audio GX-80 effects section

Where It Falls Short

There's a lot of panel. Four ranks, two filter models and the GX-specific extras add up to a lot of controls, and both MusicRadar and MusicTech flagged the learning curve. You'll lean on presets at first. MusicRadar also pointed out that there are so many filter options you'll run out of MIDI faders quickly if you like to map things to hardware.

It wants a reasonable machine too. Cherry Audio recommends a 3.4GHz quad-core or Apple M1 with 8GB RAM, and stacking big four-rank patches isn't free. And of course the ribbon is a mouse control, not a strip under your fingers, so some of the CS-80's feel inevitably goes missing.

Getting Started

A tip if you're new to CS-80 programming: start with one layer and one rank, get a sound you like, then use the Utility copy functions to duplicate it across ranks and detune or re-filter the copies. That's how the big sounds are built, and it's much less daunting than staring at the whole panel at once.

Who It's For

Film and TV composers, ambient and cinematic producers, synthwave and anyone after Vangelis brass and evolving pads. It's less suited to tight dance basses or quick plucks, where a simpler synth gets you there faster. If you own a keyboard with aftertouch, you'll get much more out of it.

Key Features

Based on the Yamaha CS-80 with GX-1 additions
Two layers of 16 voices, stacked or split
Four voice ranks, each with oscillator, highpass and lowpass filters, noise, sine and dual envelopes
CS-80 and GX-1 filter models, CS ring modulator
Polyphonic and monophonic aftertouch, plus simulated poly aftertouch
Modelled pitch ribbon, portamento and glissando
Chorus/rotary, flange/phaser, digital/tape delay and Galactic reverb
Original CS-80 factory voices plus 1,000+ presets
Adjustable oversampling, Focus zoom, full MIDI control and DAW automation

System Requirements

macOS 10.13 or later, 64-bit, native Apple Silicon support
Windows 7 or later (including Windows 11), 64-bit
AU, VST, VST3, AAX and standalone
3.4GHz quad-core or Apple M1 with 8GB RAM recommended, internet connection for activation

We're an authorised Cherry Audio reseller. Digital delivery: licence activation code sent by email. Cherry Audio offers a free 30-day demo on its own site if you want to try it first.

Get the sound: Cherry Audio - GX-80