If you’re a regular visitor on any discussion board in the online audio community, chances are you’ve stumbled on a story about a synthesizer being built by Behringer. The rumour mill has been spinning wildly over the last couple of years, and with fresh video material being published by the Music Group brand it looks like tongues are not about to rest any time soon.

Analog and Discrete

Accompanied by the words “She is analog, she is discrete, She sounds amazing, and she is REAL”, a first teaser video was released on social media earlier this month.

In the video Comments from artists like Vile Electrodes, Richard Devine and Allert Aalders range from “Ow Cheeks, to “Very Cool” and “it sounds very modular”.

As with any teaser video, it’s nearly impossible to see details about the product itself, although a couple of fragments are shown very briefly, …and very intentionally no doubt…

Classic design with wooden side panels

The first flash of the product clearly shows a wooden- almost red colored, side panel, and white Moog-style pitch and modulation wheels, accompanied by something that looks like 2 adjustment knobs. It remains uncertain what these knobs control but logically these could be either bend controls (DCO VCF) like on classic Roland Synths or Glide/ Release as seen on Moog-style synths.

Dual LFO and DCO control

A bit further in the video we see a back-lit button labelled “Analog” and “VCA / VCF” controls appear, and somewhat later in the video a “Sync” button is shown as well. It is very likely the Sync button refers to a dual oscillator implementation – which is confirmed in another video later on. Down the road we spot that Attack, Sustain, release and Decay controls are handled with sliders - simple hands-on control as it should...

Dual DCO control is available with Pitch modulation and Pulse Width control on the first,  and, Pitch and Tone modulation + Pitch on the second. Although the unit is analog, DCO control will provide stable control, and with multiple parameters under direct control sound shaping will be absolute fun with this device.

A second video captures thoughts from producers Neil Davidge Robbie Bronnimann and divkid.

Another piece of the unit’s control section is laid out clearly- and we can distinguish the 2 LFO sections (labelled LFO 1 and LFO2 ), both with “Rate” and “Delay Time”  sliders.

In between the sliders LED’s indicating the shape of the wave that can be set;

49 key Full Size keyboard

We clearly count 29 white, what appear to be “full-size” white keys, indicating that we’re looking at a 49-key keyboard. While we’ve seen “compact” and desktop versions of popular synths being re-released by various manufacturers recently, a 49 key –full size board is great news.

Polyphonic

In the third video we find out that we’re looking at a polyphonic synth.
Polyphony opens up another chapter when it comes to sound design. The only questions that remains is what this means for the price point on the unit when it comes out.

Behringer has integrated a Unison Detune control slider, which allows you to control the tuning in a compact way, and which no doubt can be used to obtain an even fatter sound.

12 Voices

Adding to the fact that the unit is polyphonic, the fourth video unveils that the synth has no less than 12 voices. We hear comments like "It really has some kind of Oberheim-ee, and a Juno feel"- referring to machines built by Synth legend Tom Oberheim and the popular Roland Juno 106 polyphonic synthesizers, and "It has such an organic sound to it".

Only time will tell whether this synth will receive a spot in the synthesizer hall of fame alongside these legends, but with the specs we can see at this point we are very confident the device will find its way to numerous band's setups, and will without any doubt feature on many records in the future.

Excitement for the future

At the time of writing no official news of any release date, pricing, full specs or even complete pictures of the unit are available just yet. At least these videos confirm that the rumours are indeed true, and we can expect a very pretty, well-sounding synthesizer. We are looking forward to seeing more details in the near future.