You’d expect that holding the world’s largest trade show in Germany would mean some serious analog and gear love – and you’d be right. Andreas Schneider of SchneidersBuero/SchneidersLaden, the famed Berlin gear hub, was this year gathering some of the finest analog gear at a booth for ALEX4, a European distributor for some of these names.
Now, in the meeting room there was of course real business to do, but that shouldn’t stop drool from pooling on some of the equipment.
Among the highlights:
Doepfer Musikelektronik, the company that perhaps more than any other ignited the current modular fever, was on-hand with some new prototypes, including a step sequencer (video) and touch plate, all works-in-progress.
Doepfer also had a demo unit of the Dark Energy II, the new version of their lovely, affordable desktop analog synth. The Dark Energy is discontinued because Doepfer was unable to continue to stock the CEM3394 chip used in the filter. The revision, slated for availability this summer, was available. To underly the point that the filter is the only major change, you’ll see that knob highlighted in yellow. (There are some other subtle tweaks; the resulting instrument sounds really quite nice.)
Alyseum showed off the MS-812, an embedded computer board that works on an Ethernet network to provide MIDI, CopperLan (a futuristic, new high-resolution and high-bandwidth protocol), and analog Control Voltage. Just how much of it? Think 8 dedicated CV outs, 12 digital outs, and conversion between everything. If I were building a new computer lab and wanted to network a whole bunch of analog gear and computers and MIDI equipment together, or making some massive MIDI/CopperLan/CV art installation, I think I’d be looking at this.
Vermona also had a multi-MIDI, multi-CV module, pictured. (Please: whoever owns all this gear, send pictures of what your rig looks like.)
You may spot a few other gems in our gallery, including the Synchrodyne WMD recently previewed by TRASH_AUDIO. As I can walk to Schneidersladen, let us know if there’s anything about which you’re especially curious.
And that concludes today’s episode of Create Analog Music, which raises the question – will I have to start a reader campaign to see if TRASH_AUDIO will give us their createanalogmusic.com domain name?
