SinTH2 puts 120 knobs on a 60-voice synth you can only order direct

SinTH2 premiered on 18 July, and it is not an instrument you add to a basket. The four-person team behind it builds each unit to order from Piła in Poland, settles the colour scheme and the mechanical and software details with the buyer individually, and quotes two to three weeks from order to delivery. Three versions are listed: a desktop at €5,800, a fixed-panel keyboard at €6,799 and a folding-panel version at €6,999, all VAT included, with those prices held until 15 August.

The specification is ambitious for an operation this size. The maker lists 60-voice polyphony, four multiwave oscillators carrying 128 waveforms each, a fifth single-wave oscillator with six banks of 128, and 3 GB of waveform data. That feeds 18 dB low-pass, band-pass and high-pass filters, five LFOs covering pitch, filter, amplitude and pan, two global envelopes plus one dedicated to the fifth oscillator, and a DSP section running drive, ensemble, phaser, delay, reverb and EQ.

The control surface is the actual argument. There are 120 potentiometers, nine encoders, 36 buttons and four OLED displays, with motion recording on every knob, a 16-step polyphonic sequencer and 1920 preset slots behind them. A knob per function instead of a menu is what the site means by a new way of controlling synthesizer sounds. The casing is solid wood, the keyboard is Fatar, the output is balanced XLR, and a stereo input feeds the effects processor.

All of that comes from the maker’s own specification. There are no independent reviews yet, and photographs of the three versions are still marked as in preparation, so the spec sheet is a statement of intent until someone plays one. The first chance is 31 July, when the team demonstrates it at the DEMO music store in Piła. They are arranging further dates in Switzerland and Berlin.

Producer’s note

Motion recording on every knob is the thing to test first if you reach a demo. On a panel this size it decides whether you have a performance instrument or a fast editor, and the question to ask is whether recorded moves play back per voice or across all 60 at once. That single answer changes what the sequencer is for.