Produs achiziționat de la Soundcreation in septembrie 2023. Vine ca nou, perfect funcțional în propria cutie. Este in garanție până în septembrie 2025. Se poate trimite garanțiea pe mail.
Se oferă un set de sunete la achiziționare cadou.
Pentru mai multe detalii mă puteți contacta.

The Blofeld has three oscillators per voice, two of which are capable of delivering wavetable synthesis or analogue modelling, while the third is devoted to analogue emulation only. Each oscillator may be routed freely through two filters; these are selected from a diverse collection of filter types and topped off with filter panning and drive options that take sonic mangling to another level. Three fully-featured LFOs, four snappy envelopes and Waldorf's ever-powerful modulation matrix are on hand for when you need controlled complexity in your patches. Further delights include 16-part multitimbrality, a programmable arpeggiator and more than 1000 sounds to use or to overwrite. Polyphony can be up to 25 voices, depending on DSP load. Oh, and did I mention that there are effects too? Clearly, this would be an impressive synthesizer in any class but is all the more so when you take a look the bottom line.

There are limits to Waldorf's generosity, of course, and some of them become obvious when you take a look at the rear panel. The presence of just two audio outputs is probably to be expected at this price point, but it is the single MIDI port that caused me the most immediate concern. The Blofeld has MIDI In only — there's no MIDI Out and definitely no Thru. This means that if you wish to offload any of your patches for external storage, you must use a computer and USB. Fortunately the USB port provides full MIDI I/O, so if you are a PC or Mac owner you do have options — but if your studio is hardware MIDI-only, you'll have issues.

A headphone socket and connection for the external power supply complete the rear-panel offerings — and I sincerely hope the wall-wart supplied to UK buyers is different to the one I received. I've really had my fill of perching Euro connections into wobbly shaver adaptors — I thought there was some kind of law against this sort of thing!

Getting Started
Just for a change (no, not really!), my first job prior to making any noises was to upgrade the Operating System and factory sounds. Waldorf recommend Windows 98, Windows XP (or higher) or Mac OSX 10.3.9 (or higher) as supported platforms. Upgrading the OS proved perfectly straightforward: I connected the synth to my Windows XP PC via USB, at which point the Blofeld was recognised as a generic USB Audio device. This device appeared in the MIDI port list in my sequencer program, making it a simple matter to send the appropriate MIDI file. The whole OS updating process took about 11 seconds and probably left me feeling rather over-confident about the prospect of updating the factory sounds.

I needed to upgrade these because initial versions of the soundset reportedly suffer from drastic variations in volume and I wanted to start with a clean sheet. As it happened, this updating procedure proved rather less painless than the first one. Firstly, sending the data produced no indication that all the sounds had been correctly loaded. There was an occasional message that SysEx was being received but afterwards I could spot no obvious differences — my data load had clearly not worked. I experienced a vague sense of déjà vu, remembering similar issues with my Microwave XT, which at least offered the clue that it was reorganising its memory during a receive, meaning that you had to try again. Sometimes again and again, watching the damn thing throughout! Anyway, in the end I completely re-initialised all patches and reloaded from scratch, this time sending the MIDI file at a very slow tempo. Thankfully, this appeared to work, although I thought some patches still sounded a tad quiet. I can only hope that Waldorf manage to improve the process in the future, perhaps providing some kind of simple software application to do it via USB.

Something also worthy of note, if you have purchased a Blofeld but are unable to find the latest soundset, is that the printed 'Quick Start' manual points you to the wrong Waldorf web site — the correct one is documented in the full manual to be found on the supplied CD.

Enter The Matrix
It was in 1996 that I first encountered a Waldorf synthesizer that employed the matrix method of parameter access. This was the powerful analogue monosynth they call the Pulse, and it used a matrix instead of a panel of dedicated knobs. The system worked pretty well, saving considerable cost by allowing just a few physical controls to operate a wide array of parameters. Time passed, and further refinements came along in the form of proper displays and continuous encoders. The Microwave 2 possessed what I still regard as the fastest, most intuitive variation on this theme.

The Blofeld's matrix is a two-tier system based around seven perky encoders, a delightfully sharp graphical display and a series of buttons and LEDs. At its simplest level, the menu system is navigated via the four buttons for oscillators, filters, modulation and so on. Where there are several options, multiple button-presses step through them, the position at all times shown by an LED. The matrix rows are labelled in a small neat font that my ageing eyes can just about cope with, and having done your button pushing, you simply grab the relevant encoder and tweak away. For most quick editing purposes, you might never need to go much deeper.