Dave Smith, the creator of the legendary Prophet 5, Wavestation, and first soft-synth in the world, the driving force behind MIDI, has done it again with his latest innovative synthesizer, destined to be a legend, the PolyEvolver Keyboard which he demonstrated for the first time here at Winter NAMM. The keyboard has 4 voices, each a complete Evolver identical to the mono Evolver and Poly Evolver rack. If you want more voices, simply chain Poly Racks using the dedicated poly chain MIDI output. Specs are basically the same as the Poly Evolver rack, i.e. 512 Programs, 384 Combos, etc. Of course, there’s the 78 knobs, 58 switches, blinking LFO and sequence blue LEDS, and backlit wheels that make this instrument scream “tweak me!” This ain’t no virtual synth…
Once you play a Poly Evolver, you’ll immediately hear what’s missing with all those soft and virtual synths – this is real! Finally some personality and individuality in a polyphonic synth. As with the Evolver, the idea was not to create an analog retro synth, but to start with the benefits of true analog design, and then go well beyond with the tightly integrated digital features. You get all the old stuff (yes, these are Curtis filters) plus an all-new sound.
Features:
- The Poly Evolver is a 61-key, four voice analog synthesizer
- Four oscillators in total: two analog, two digital.
- Analog Oscillator waveshape are Sawtooth, Triangle, Saw-Triangle, and Pulse (with voltage-controlled analog Pulse-Width modulation).
- Digital Oscillators select from 96 wavetables from the Prophet-VS (128 x 12 bits), and 32 user-loadable (via MIDI) Wavetables (128 x 16 bits). The Digital Oscillators get trashy as the frequency gets higher, as with the original VS.
- Hard Sync on the analog oscillators.
- FM and Ring Mod on the digital oscillators.
- Separate Glide per oscillator, with two glide modes.
- Real voltage-controlled analog lowpass filters – not digital recreations. 4-pole/2-pole switchable, fully resonant (in 4-pole mode). There are two separate filters, one for the left channel and one for the right.
- Analog Voltage Controlled Amplifiers (VCA), again one for each channel.
- Dual digital 4-pole Highpass filters (one per channel); place before or after analog electronics.
- Stereo audio inputs; Noise generator.
- Envelope Follower and Peak Detect from External Input to use as modulation sources.
- External Input can be used to gate envelopes and/or step the Sequencer.
- Three snappy ADSR envelopes.
- Four LFOs (sync with sequencer and MIDI).
- Dual (left and right channel) tunable feedback loops; modulate frequency and amount.
- Delay with 3 taps; each with separate time and amount modulation. Syncs to sequencer/MIDI. Normal feedback and additional feedback path through analog filters.
- Distortion! Digital, one for each channel, can be placed before or after analog electronics.
- 3 Banks of 128 Programs for 384 total Programs – dump to/from MIDI.
- 16 x 4 Analog-style sequencer – syncs with MIDI.
- Extensive Modulation capabilities, including audio-range modulation. Bipolar (+/-) modulation.
- Easy to program matrix-style front panel with 8 endless-turn rotary encoders.
- A bunch of MIDI stuff.
- The Poly Evolver comes with a free Mac/PC standalone editor
- The internal controllers and DSP chips can be reprogrammed via MIDI, for easy feature additions.