A New Synth Legend In-The-Making For Your Desktop!
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.
Related Videos: Poly Evolver
We could go on and on about the amazing Poly Evolver by Dave Smith instruments, but we'd rather let Dave Smith tell you about the Evolver in his own words:
"There have been requests for both a rack mount Evolver, and for a polyphonic Evolver, so a 4-voice Polyphonic Evolver in a 1U rack seemed a logical choice for my second product. The 4 voices are each a complete Evolver, which not only provides backwards compatability with a monophonic Evolver, but also allows a number of cool features to play with.
Each voice still has its own sequencer. This allows some great wave-sequencing applications by gating sequences polyphonically from the keyboard. Each voice also has its own effects, such as feedback, distortion, and delay, which enables completely independent processing of each voice for a super thick sound.
The stereo audio inputs go to all four voices, each of which can select to process or ignore the external signals, so you can do quad parallel processing of any audio source. Or, since there are stereo outputs on each of the four voices, you can route the output of one voice to the input of another voice for some interesting effects.
Overall, the Poly Evolver, while retaining all of Evolver's wild capabilities, has emerged with its own personality. Many sounds that just didn't make much sense on the monophonic Evolver really shine when played polyphonically - this will be a real pad-monster machine. The wavesequencing is another. On the other hand, some Evolver sounds are actually too huge to play polyphonically, so I guess it works in both directions.
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 - check it out!"
Dave Smith Instruments Poly Evolver Features:- The Poly Evolver is a four voice analog synthesizer in a 1U 19" rack. It is fully programmable from the front panel.
- 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.
- The Poly's universal power supply runs virtually anywhere; 100 - 240 V AC, 50-60 Hz. All Poly Evolvers are shipped with Euro adaptor plugs.
- The Poly Evolver is 19" wide, 6" deep, and 1.75" high (27 x 15 x 4 cm). Yes, it is small!
