On redundancy OR How I learned to stop worrying and love the Quantum

I love wavetable synthesis a la PPG/Waldorf. It's not always a needed sound in my music (actually it rarely is) but from a purely synthesis POV it's probably my favorite type of sound--to me, it just harkens back to the earliest days of academic additive synthesis experiments and the notion that somehow digital synthesis could recreate anything. And yet it always sounds 100% synthetic; there's literally no equivalent for a wavetable sweep in the analog/acoustic domain. 

So I get excited when someone comes out with a new version of this but there's also the issue of redundancy. A common theme among my gear decisions is that one thing usually does something better than some other thing and to that end you don't need both. This isn't an argument for one synth to rule them all, just the notion that synth people are obsessed with subtle differences between pieces of that are meaningless in the context of actual music. My eyes literally roll out of my head across the floor and then into the gutter when I see people making arguments for why they have both a Juno-106 and Juno-60... Or OB-X and OB-Xa/8, blah blah blah... They literally all sound the same outside of your collector bubble. 

For less obviously similar synths, however, particularly digital ones, you've (I've) ultimately got to try them first, if to only to confirm what I already knew. But that's a lot of time and energy of course, so I was very happy to fend off not one but two very likely purchases with the Quantum this week. The first is the Silhouette Eins, an incredible optical synthesizer that uses images/video to create digital sounds; the second is the very soon to be release Kodamo Mask1, which uses a novel digital synthesis method to create interesting new waveforms. 

Ignoring the practicality of a visual synthesizer for someone who doesn't "do" visuals... ahem. The audio output of the Eins sounds wonderful, very wavetable-y, with lots of shifting overtones and hypnotic grinding harmonics. I don't know what the actual wave generation is based on but it has wavetable/additive qualities whatever it is. With a synth that is based on image position and color and contrast there is the potential to really shift tones rapidly, but a quick exploration of the Quantum last night reminded me of how easy it is to do the same there. S/H on the wavetable position, modulate the Spectrum value, and boom... Not the same as modulating the "sound" of a fossil decapod image crossed with a picture of a broken coffee cup, but close enough. 

On the Mask1, Kodamo has taken a decidedly old school approach to the UI for a decidedly new synthesis approach. I'm not really going to discuss the UI--it reminds me of the Korg DW/EX-8000 and seems perfectly functional, if excessively minimalistic (knobs are always going to have more appeal than hunt and peck button parameters). On the synthesis side (whose actual basis is better left to Kodamo to explain) there's plenty of shifting digital spectra to invoke wavetable-y or FM sounds. But how dramatically different would this be to what the Quantum can do with wavetables... or Resonators... or the FM/Additive synthesis engine? Probably not that much. Phew. 

So there we have it, two less synths to worry about. No slight against them--they both sound great and find their own distinct niches in a surprisingly crowded digital synth market. But if there was one synth to rule them all in terms of digital synthesis, it would probably be the Quantum, so it was always going to be an uphill battle for any synth that only does a fraction of what this does, however uniquely they do it.