Alex Ball Unleashes the Prophet~T8: Luxury, Legends, and Lost Battles

Let’s not mince words: the Prophet~T8 is the synth equivalent of a vintage Bentley—rare, expensive, and guaranteed to make your back ache if you ever try to move it. Sequential Circuits, helmed by Dave Smith, cooked up this beast between 1983 and 1985, aiming to outclass everything else in the studio with sheer luxury and technical bravado.

Alex Ball wastes no time painting the T8 as the flagship that was supposed to keep Sequential on top after the Prophet 5’s glory days. The T8 was built to impress, with a price tag that could buy you a small car and a footprint that would dominate any studio. But as we all know, synth history is littered with beautiful failures—and the T8’s story is pure synth soap opera.

Here’s where things get spicy. The T8’s headline act is its polyphonic aftertouch and fully weighted wooden keyboard—features that, even today, make gear nerds weak at the knees. Alex demonstrates how each note can be individually mangled with aftertouch, sending filters and LFOs into orbit without dragging the whole chord along for the ride.

You get polyphonic glide, stereo splits, and enough modulation destinations to keep even the most jaded sound designer busy. It’s expressive, it’s clever, and it’s probably more than most players can handle. But that’s the point: the T8 wasn’t built for the faint-hearted. It was a flex, pure and simple.

Despite all that tech muscle, the T8 landed with a thud. Alex doesn’t sugarcoat it: by the time this analog monster hit the shelves, the world had moved on. The Yamaha DX7 was the shiny new toy, and the T8’s analog warmth suddenly looked old-fashioned and overpriced.

With a price three times that of a DX7 and weighing nearly 30 kilos, the T8 was a tough sell. Most players didn’t know what to do with all that expression, and the market just wasn’t interested in a flagship analog when digital was the new king. Sequential covered their costs, but the T8 was never going to be a chart-topper.

Here’s the twist: while the T8 flopped commercially, it still found its way into the hands of synth royalty. Alex rattles off a who’s who of ‘80s icons—Howard Jones, Talking Heads, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Billy Curry, the Thompson Twins, The Fixx, and even the mighty Tears for Fears. The T8’s lush sounds and expressive keyboard made it a secret weapon in the studio and on stage, proving that, sometimes, the underdog gets the last laugh.