Chromatix

Chromatix is a celebration of yet another successful resurrection of an old classic saved from the grave… This time it was a gorgeous 1983 Chroma!

After a very deep clean inside and out followed by a visual inspection it was quickly realised the original rather large and somewhat grizzly linear PSU had burnt out and was showing signs of several past repairs. News got round that a new cooler running switched mode PSU retrofit had been made available and was duly installed. Having returned power to the beast it quickly transpired that at least two voice cards had serious issues and were failing the dreaded auto-tune.

This rapidly became a can of worms when it became apparent that almost all of the considerable number of analog multiplexors within the beast was practically dying in front of Loot Audio's eyes due to age and after the shock of being pressed back into action for the first time in several years. Following removal and replacement of some 40 or so unsocketed ICs much of the instrument returned to life leaving a final stubborn voice card really determined not to play ball.

On discovery of a number of leaky transistor arrays and tired charge pump oscillators, the final voice card eventually succumb to Loot Audio's continued harassment only to have a third voice card fail during soak testing!

After two weeks of intense toil this 16 VCO beast returneth to life… and what a beast!

16 VCO Analog Synth

Philip Dodds was left to head a company dying before his eyes and several months of development were lost to company politics. The situation became dire and he was eventually left with little option but to close down the R&D department. Despite the ongoing stress of the situation, he succeeded in selling the IP rights to the Chroma design to CBS Musical Instruments and in the process was hired to oversee its production. If it wasn’t for this last gasp for survival the Chroma would surely never have existed.

The Chroma was an advanced digitally managed 16 VCO analog synthesizer released after the initial success of the Sequential Prophet-5. Both instruments offered patch memory with the Chroma sporting a bank of 50 user programmable patches. It was one of the first analog synths to offer multi-timbral operation, voice layering and keyboard splitting with velocity sensitivity. The voice architecture was unusually flexible whereby the firmware could route signals through two low pass filters, in parallel or series, or switch the VCA before or after the filters. Through a bespoke digital interface (Chroma pre-dated MIDI) it was even possible to edit voices in a program on the Apple II computer.

CBS released the Chroma in 1981 with a list price of $5295 and proved to be pretty successful with estimates of around 1400 units eventually sold.

56 Unique Instruments

Chromatix features a deceptively powerful layering engine which allows the user to create new sounds and textures with ease by selecting up to four out of a bank of 56 partial voices to be layered. Each layer has its own fine and course tuning, ADSR envelope, panning, velocity sensitivity, LFO and tone controls. This permits anything from huge pads to complex evolving sounds. Many of the demo instrument patches included are good pointers as to how some of these effects are achieved.

Above each of the four voice panels, there is an orange LCD display showing the selected voice. By clicking on each of the displays a pull-down menu appears allowing one of 56 voice partials to be selected. With a potentially vast number of layered permutations at hand two different banks of 28 partials are available the first set assigned to channels 1 & 3 and the second bank of 28 partials assigned to channels 2 & 4.

Features

• 1030 24-bit Samples
• 56 Partials/Voices presented in 4 Channel Layering Engine
• 75 Example Instruments

System Requirements

• Full Kontakt 4.2.4 or above

Important Note: Full version of NI Kontakt 4.2.4 and above is required. Will not function with the free NI Kontakt Player.