old soviet synths

[IndigoOn]

anyone had ant experience with these?
are they worth a buy? Seem good for the price

thanks
Jake

[mirt]

Most of soviet synths are worth a buy, if they are in good condition (in usa you could have problems with service). sonicaly they are great. Sound is rather raw and agressive, (i've heard polivox, maestro, electronica em25 and em26, unost 21 and lider 2 on my own). many of soviet synth have uncomon secret weapons like poly unisono in unost 21 . Bigest problem are components (i have lel uds with housing made of soft metal like beer can, some others boxes with switches really hard to switch or one rack reverb with ears that broke when i've screw it on to rack).

[IndigoOn]

thanks, I think I shall splash out on one then, I was especially interested in a Maestro

and as I am in the UK shipping rates aren't to high from Russia and Latvia etc,

so, nice

[OriginalJambo]

Since already I've been asked twice by PM about my experience with the Polivoks it seems people are quite interested in it. If it's one you might be considering then it might benefit you for me to share my views having owned one for a while. Just warning you that it is rather long and detailed:

Is it true that nothing else sounds like it? Well if you are talking about dry...probably not much. I think the Moog LP with its built in overdrive can sound similar but beyond that you'll need some processing to match the character of the Polivoks.

Why is this? Simple, the filter is completely brutal. When you crank the resonance up it doesn't overdrive the signal, it distorts it into oblivion! Also when driven to self-oscillation the results are dirty and unpredictable. The Polivoks is MEAN.

Moving on to your second point, the sound quality. I'm no expert but from speaking to James Walker of Synth Repair Services, Jexus (who has three Polivoks himself), clueless and from the A-Z of Analogue Synthesisers by Peter Forrest it seems the Polivoks quality control is a bit suspect.

Clueless has a Polivoks and he thinks it sounds like s**t. Jexus has three and is convinced one sounds better than the other two, by quite a margin too. James Walker said mine was definitely one of the best Polivoks he's heard thus far after he repaired it - he mentioned some don't sound all that.

Now at first it seemed that according to Peter Forrest Vladimir Kuzmin (the father of the Polivoks) says the older models were of a different and potentially more desirable design which is why they sound better, like a lot of stuff in synthworld of course. Again according to Mr. Forrest they were produced from 1982 until 1990.

Mine is an '86 according to the serial number and Jexus' best one is quite a recent model also, so I'm afraid in my experience this does not check out. I think it's more a case of poor quality control and nothing to do with the period of manufacturer. So my advice is don't buy one unless you can try it out or at least hear some audio demos of it. I was quite naive when I bought mine I guess.

Okay, finally moving on to the advantages and disadvantages:

Pros:

- Fantastic filter if you like brutal sounds
- 5 waveforms per oscillator
- Very wide tuning range on the oscillators
- Bandpass filter mode (also brutal!)
- Two full ADSR envelopes
- AD sections of each envelope can be looped independently
- Sample and hold, noise modulation
- Duophony
- Interesting portamento (only affects oscillator one)
- External input
- Noise generator + bandpass = good drum synthesiser
- Fairly stable once calibrated.

Cons:

- Weaker oscillators (they aren't BAD but they aren't Minimoog quality)
- Bass isn't as deep as the LP
- No hard sync
- No pulse-width modulation
- The cross modulation setting on oscillator 1 doesn't have much of an effect, well for me at least
- No filter keyboard tracking
- Rather poor range on the LFO rate (both ways I'm afraid)
- Weird DIN audio connections
- The front panel is in Russian Cyrillic (suppose this is a pro too as it looks awesome)
- No CV/Gate although there is a mod for it that's really straightforward (it only cost me around £30 for the mod I think)
- Terrible keyboard action, although robust design
- No performance controls - wheels, sticks, ribbon etc.
- Stock transformer is as loud as f**k (mine was replaced and now it's much quieter)
- Potential reliability issues

So there you have it. Whilst the Polivoks can sound quite soft and mellow with the triangle wave or with the resonance at its minimum setting it really comes into its own at sounding nasty. I've also made some pretty cool drum sounds and an impressive dirty sitar sound as well.

I think it's a worthy synth if you know exactly what you're getting and getting into. Just make sure you want it for what it does best, that you get a good unit, that you don't get ripped off and that you know a good tech in case it needs a little TLC.