I don’t believe that the Deluxe uses a different overall keybed other than size, but I could be mistaken. It felt fairly similar to me. (which is to say, it feels great, but a good Fatar had a slightly more solid and weightier feel to it than the ASM keybed.) The Hydra keys just feel a tiny bit lighter than I generally like. My favorite keybed in recent years (aside from the Poly AT ability of the Hydra) was the Fatar in the Prophet Rev2. It is EXACTLY what I feel synth keys should feel like.
I imagine the new Fatar PolyAT bed used on the new Quantum is probably one of the best around at this point, short of maybe something with a more novel approach like the Osmose.
Well I ended up ordering a deckards dream mkII in the end. I had wanted one for so long that I decided to just go with it over the Ise nin that just really has too few online demos for me to make that expensive of a purchase. But now I can check one more synth off of my dream synth list that I wrote down years ago :-).
Other contenders were the super 6, but a quick read through the UDO forum reminded me why I sold mine in the first place (tons of bugs and quirks still). And the new Nina lost out in the end because of lack of MPE and only having a LPF.
All of you talking about mixing the Deckards with the Hydra has really gotten me thinking. I love the Hydra, and thinking of adding something as powerful as the Deckards is such a great idea.
In this price range, you can add a lot of things which are a good idea. That’s how I got the Prophet 10 rev 4 module plus two effects pedals and sold my Hydra as a consequence
For those that are curious, I think I’ll end up saving about $1400 (U.S. dollars) by building the rack version vs buying the pre-built desktop version.
Okay, so it’s alive and I’m really burned out on soldering!
Total cost landed around $2300 (not including my time and work). So I guess I saved $2000 by going DIY.
Missing 1 precision voltage source and 1 resistor on voice 8. Also ordered a heat sink to keep the voltage regulator cool.
Also needed to order some new slider caps.
Besides that it’s 99% done.
Still need to run through all of the calibrations but seems like I built this 100% mistake free on the first try
The 7 voices are sounding lush. Can’t wait for the straggler parts to arrive. Then it’s audio demo time!
I didn’t keep track really well.
I worked on it in the evenings for about 1.5 weeks.
My rough guess is around 30-40 hours of soldering. I’m pretty experienced and move kind of fast at times though.
I honestly wish it would have been more of the SMD parts. They go so much faster than through hole. Some parts were surface mount but mostly through hole.
Regardless, I don’t want to do any more soldering for a while.
Alex Ball did a great video (as always) and comparison with the J8 and Super Jupiter. sounds pretty damn close. or close enough to save yourself $20k versus an original, at least.
!