Once a week, createdigitalmusic‘s Peter Kirn checks in with oddities and essentials that make musicians drool. This week, he’s found the Mac Mini masquerading as a vintage synth and a vintage synth that’s made its way into the digital age.
Despite all this new digital music technology, vintage analog circuitry is more popular than ever. Witness the custom, all music Mac Mini-in-a-Box from Cyndustries [via Music Thing]. Within days of Apple’s announcement of Apple’s new headless Mac, these instrument designers were already working on a design to couple the Mac’s digital audio power with vintage analog oscillators and filters. Music geeks will love the Moog-style knobs and cables, with routing between continuous analog voltages and digital MIDI and audio. Add a touch-screen, cinema-wide LCD and this is truly a marriage of two generations. Sure, the G4 bogs down a bit running Apple Logic, but with custom configurations Cyndustries will stack as many Minis in there as you want! US$1000+ (estimated); call to custom order.
Also of interest to geeks, Moog Music, manufacturers of the first successful commercial synth some four decades ago, continue to find love in studios and onstage. Their new rack-mounted Voyager [pictured top] has the analog sound, great-feeling knobs (optional) wood-paneled edges of its predecessors, and some things vintage synths didn’t have, like an electric-blue backlit screen and digital-analog hybrid sounds. US$2195.
