After 20+ years in professional audio: live sound engineering, studio technical direction (Deep Forest, Pierre Jacquot), head of digital marketing at Playback.fr. A first-hand witness to the analog-to-digital shift, I track the whole audio landscape and break it down here — no fluff.
Boutique maker VAEMI has launched the Synterra, a standalone bio-interactive synthesizer that reads the shifting signals of a plant, a piece of fruit, ambient light or a simple touch and turns them into melodies. Nine synth engines, eight scales and a bargain price: this one is a genuine oddity.
Yorkville has built a powered subwoofer around a single 24-inch driver and is calling it a world first. 5,000 watts peak, 143 dB SPL and a 30 Hz reach: here is a close look at the monolith aimed at the most demanding low-end reinforcement rigs.
Dusk Audio is back with Tape Echo 2, a free, open-source emulation of the legendary Roland Space Echo. Three playback heads, a spring reverb and the full mechanics of the tape modeled end to end — all under a GPL license, no sign-up required.
Audio Damage drags the legendary 1983 Roland MC-202 into the plugin era. The AD-202 keeps the single oscillator and ladder filter of the little silver box, then bolts on polyphony, MPE and microtuning — a cult monosynth finally freed from its fiddly onboard sequencer.
The Roland RE-201 Space Echo is still the reference for tape echo. Here are eight plugins that bring it into your DAW, from free to high-end — and, honestly, which ones truly do the job versus which are only cousins.
Dawesome sets Abyss II for 20 August 2026: the second generation of its visual synth deepens the engine, adds a mono mode, sample import and full MPE support, without abandoning its founding idea — designing sound by colour rather than by calculation.
Softube releases the Reference 1998 and Reference 1956 Equalizer, two passive tube EQs built for colour and broad musical moves. Available for macOS and Windows from $79, with mid/side and a Headroom control on the 1956.
Lawo gives its Edge One a European debut at IBC 2026: a compact edge device combining video (SDI, HDMI) and audio (MADI, XLR, USB-C) connectivity on a native ST 2110 network, with swappable modules and on-demand FLEX licensing.
A PA system isn’t tuned by ear alone. Delay, phase, gain, tonal response: here’s how to align mains, subs and delays so the whole room hears the same sound.
Triton Audio, the company behind the FetHead, adds a single-knob tone control to its in-line preamp. The Tilt EQ delivers 22 dB of clean gain and reshapes a mic’s tone straight off the XLR, without ever passing phantom power to the microphone.