Two new desktop synths are available

Small, independent manufacturers are still keeping the flag of the hardware synthsizer units up for the sake of the enthusiasts. In the first picture is RozzBox One V2 from L. L. Electronics, which is a renowned version of a previous product - now it has 5-note polyphony (instead of being monophonic), and it has got an additional filter stage with a real tube. It produces sound with digital oscillators, and has three filter solution: a digital one with variable characteristics, an ordinary analog 24 dB low-pass filter, plus the tube filter with low-cut also. It eves does FM with seven algorhythms. Multitimbral up to five parts, and has independent outputs for all the five voices. Costs 2000 USD, here.

Prophet 08 user's manual published

Dave Smith keeps the Prophet 08 campaign very hot: now he has published the user's manual of the new analog supersynth online, you can download it from here. We still haven't read it, if you find something cool please comment this post.

Brand-new mellotron is on the market

This month's issue of Future Music publishes a quick test of a new instrument from the two mellotron-specialist, John Bradley and Martin Smith. Their company, Streetly Electronics has just released a new top-mellotron called M4000 which is seriously superior than all the former models. It has 24 built-in sound programs, and the switching time between them is quite short (if you consider the fact this is a mellotron): 9 to 60 seconds. A new gadget on the product line is a two-digits display with which you can adjust the start point of the samples - a feature which is very well known in today's samplers. The price of the instrument is horrible if you compare with samplers and soft samplers: around 10,000 USD but you get a real and working piece of an ancient instrument for that money. Check their site for more.

Prophet 08: the first official photo

No more rumours: Dave Smith has posted the first photo of his planned Prophet 08 synthesizer on his website. Incredible.

Prophet reloaded

Dave Smith brings life into the hardware synth platform again: Prophet 5's 30th anniversary inspired him to continue this product line with Prophet 8, an all-analog but state-of-the-art piece electronic equipment. One of his employee, David Bryce has announced it via this Vintage Synth forum topic, and later a teaser YouTube-video has arrived also. They develop the instrument in complete secret, it has eight voice with built-in sequencer and arpeggiator, has a reasonable amount of patch memory, and costs only 2000 USD (street price).

A special MiKo from OpenLabs

It will be a bit easier to follow Timbaland, the great producer from 15th August: on that day OpenLabs will ship the Timbaland Special Edition of their small Windows-synth called MiKo. The instrument was configured by the famous producer - it will have 4 gigs of RAM, and a Core2 Duo processor. Its main instrument is Proteus X2, with a huge selection of more than 7,000 preset samples (associated with Timbaland mostly). OpenLabs also provide their own huge library so you won't be short of sounds. Check all the details here.