Years ago, when I worked at Oberheim Electronics (working on the DPX1, gobble, gobble), Dave Smith's first Sequential Circuits was still around. Like Tom Oberheim and Roger Linn, he was a brilliant analog engineer. Like Roger Linn but unlike Tom Oberheim, he got out while the getting was good, just ahead of the Yamaha DX-7 destroying the US synthesizer industry.
Smith was, in fact, largely responsible for the invention of MIDI, since he didn't want to have to build yet another damned sequencer. He also held a patent on the scanning keyboard, resulting in what must have been a nice little royalty stream.
But Smith's back, and he's making utterly drool-worthy equipment. I'm not 100% sure, but this seem to have an architectur similar to the Oberheim Xpander and Matrix-12 (although it probably doesn't use dual 6800s as the processors). It also seems to have the wonderful advantage that you can feed external audio through the filter array, not just the output of the generators.
Yum.
posted 21:46