Turkeys!

[soundwave]

So there's that amazingly featured bit of kit from a small exclusive company seeming like their creating a machine with innovation and genuine passion but when you fork out over the odds in reality it's a clunky piece of turd that's under developed and missing some very obvious features that makes you hope that the resale value on such an exclusive item won't make you feel too much like a sad GAShead.

 

Radikal Spectralis - amazing hybrid analogue sound, fuck all modulation matrix, bland VA polysynths and the sampler is completely unneeded. The menu system requires a lot of patience and isn't designed well for performance which is the whole point of the machine. There's lot of clunky external MIDI problems and future features that will probably never see the light of day. A very powerful bit of kit but an interface designed to be used in a uniform fashion and enough time between updates to get a Star Wars trilogy out! Can still do some very powerful exclusive things if you have the time.

 

Teenage Engineering OP-1 - great simplistic design philosophy and cute graphical interface but for a portable device with a 16hr battery you get no form of local storage, any sound goes over the end of the clip you want to extract there's a very noticeable 'click' which renders the whole process unusable. There have been a few updates that are more concerned with giving you helicopter games than resolving this major issue. Initially its refreshing and a lot of fun to use with a very crisp 24 bit sound but the the novelty wears off very quickly like a jump dive off mount Everest. One for hipster posing.

 

Polymorph - predecessor to the Spectralis and what looks like an ultimate VA with a great interface tunrs out to be a fancy rompler with most of its features buried in menus again. You get two or three octaves of usable sounds and x4 16 step analogue style sequencer per part but you can only awkwardly edit 8 steps at a time.

 

Roand MC303 - all the sounds of the classic Roland machines watered down into a shitty rompler DJ toy! I paid £500 for one of these shit sandwiches in 1996! The MC505 was an improvement with the JV engine but still a clunky doorstop.

 

Korg Prophecy - all the synthesis method of the past an future in a hard to program lo-fi 1st gen VA synth with crap filters.

 

Kurzwiel K2000 - technically amazing features for its time but almost as bad as a DX7 to program and to do anything more than mashing a sample up into a wave wrapped mess.

 

Sherman Filterbank 2 - amazing on paper and good demos but the distortion/overdrive element hides a lot of internal crosstalk which spoils what could have been the ultimate filter unit. It had a unique sound you can't get from VST's the problem being anything you put though it just sounds like a Sherman Filterbank as is all or nothing with the tone.

 

 

any Turkeys that stuffed you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[kakapo]

MAM MB33 mkii

 

Picked a rebadged terratec one up about ten years ago for £150. It's actually quite good as a simple monosynth and has some nice features, but... resonance is nothing like a 303, I may as well stick a whistle up my arse, and it's never actually made it onto a track other than use as an external filter.