Grenoble, France (MuseWire) – XILS-lab, makers of some notable virtual synth recreations such as the PolyKB II, have announced The Synthix, which appears to be inspired by the Elka Synthex, but not a pixel by pixel or identical cloning as the typical Arturia instruments are wont to do. Apparently it was developed out of a goal to create morphable filters for the PolyKB product, and this led to an adventure in sound in the heart of France.

According to the company and developers: “It is inspired by a famous and legendary Synthesizer from the 80’s, which a lot of talented guys used as their central Keyboard, including some synths Gurus. It’s a piece of history, maybe the last Vintage Analog Polyphonic synthesizer. It has a special multitimbral mode, 5 different hi quality and hi character filters, as you could expect from a Xils-Lab synth. It is MORE than a strict emulation. It has many additional features compared to its glorious ancestor, as you could expect from a modern era synthesizer.”

The Synthix is a virtual 16 voices analog synthesizer and as it, brings what we can call now standard analog features :

Two oscillators with 4 selectable waveforms, Triangle, Saw, Square, Pulse and its dedicated PWM and Ring modulator mode. Additionally, the Triangle and Sawtooth waveforms do have PWM modes. Several waveforms can be selected simultaneously for each of the oscillators.
One multimode filter based on the CEM 3320 chip emulation, providing Self oscillating 12 dB and 24 dB low pass, 6 and 12 dB band pass, and 12 dB high pass modes.
Four D-ADSR : an enhanced standard ADSR envelope with a MIDI syncable delay.
Four LFOs, including two neverseen LFOS types.
Four embedded effects : Delay, Chorus, Phaser, Dual EQs
One Multi-track sequencer
Several playing modes including A la Moog mono modes and several Polyphonic modes

The Synthix, has every XILS-lab products, brings also some never seen features :

The Chaox : an LFO based on fully calculated chaotics functions. real life enters in synthesizers
The Rythm : an LFO with uses the Rythm for its main purpose.
Guitar modes, Circular and random polyphonic modes

And last but not least, The Synthix is multi-layer and has a polytimbral mode:

8 totaly independant layers (each layer can have its own set of oscillators, filters, envelopes, glide and lfos, with independent settings).
2 keyboards, each with its own independent arpeggiator and MIDI settings management.

The Synthix is available with the following formats :

Mac OSX 10.3.9 and later : VST, Audio Unit, RTAS (Protools 7.0 and later)
Windows XP, Vista and 7 ; VST, RTAS (Protools 7.0 and later)

For the moment the Synthix is a 32 bits plug-in, but a 64 bit version will be released soon.

More information including audio demos: http://www.xils-lab.com/pages/Synthix.html .

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