Three years late, Behringer's AKS Mini opens pre-orders at €119

Announced in January 2023 with a promised summer release, Behringer’s AKS Mini has finally reached the pre-order stage, three and a half years and one entire product-cycle joke later. It’s here now, priced at €119, and it’s arguably the most charming of the company’s pocket-synth line.

The inspiration is the EMS Synthi AKS of 1972, the briefcase development of the VCS 3 that soundtracked Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Brian Eno’s early experiments, and later turned up under Depeche Mode’s fingers. Behringer isn’t claiming a full clone; the pin matrix is gone and the architecture is simplified, but the company says the three VCOs and the filter are faithful reproductions of the original AKS circuitry, with an analog signal path throughout. The three oscillators run variable saw and square shapes and can play three-voice paraphonic or unison, through a resonant low-pass filter, an LFO with sine, saw, square and random shapes pointed at pitch and cutoff, and a four-stage envelope styled after the original’s trapezoid controls.

The famous X/Y joystick survives, assignable to any two parameters, alongside 27 touch-sensitive keys, a 16-step sequencer with motion recording and ten memory slots, and a built-in digital spring reverb. At 360 grams it powers over USB-C from a power bank or phone, with 5-pin MIDI in, TRS sync, and full NRPN/CC control of every parameter for software editors. Delivery, in Behringer tradition, is expected to take a few months; the ordering, at least, is real.

Producer’s note

On anything Synthi-flavoured, assign the joystick to one oscillator’s pitch and the filter cutoff, then leave a second oscillator droning underneath. That’s the whole Radiophonic Workshop trick: one hand performs the chaos, the drone holds the music together.