Something must be weird with communication involving Donner’s preorder system and suport teams. They reached out to me last week to let me know my order won’t be fulfilled until release date, asking if I’d like to cancel it. I told them I’d like to keep the order. This morning, they sent a different email telling me they apologize for my issue and would like to help. I didn’t have an issue, they contacted me. I understand wires get crossed and I’m not upset - something is clearly wrong though and I feel bad for the poor CS reps having to keep with my nonexistent ticket.
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Update: they are now asking for pics of a bank statement and credit card claiming my order is a “risk order.” They can fuck all the way off, I don’t need the thing this badly. I used a virtual card for the payment and I’m not about to hand my info over.
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LOL! What?! Sure random manufacturer, here’s a shit ton of my sensitive financial information… 
Makes one wonder if they’ve been hacked. Either that or they’re outright irresponsible…
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lol nope. Absolutely not!
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In case anyone’s interested, here’s a photo of the backside of the KB-32M
It can be powered by USB, and connected to any other device via MIDI.
No clue if it also does MIDI via USB.
It also has its own tiny display.
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So is this 101 clone out yet or not? As much as I like my boutique, the cutoff fader is just a bit too small for smooth filter sweeps in a live setting. It looks like these faders will be a bit longer?
MIDI CC from your Sequencer?
I think it remains to be seen if this is an 101 clone that can accurately replicate the SH-101 sound, like the boutique does.
I’d wait for some side-by-side reviews
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Nah, the whole point of the boutique is that I have one unit I can look at and see the patch so I can then play with the faders. There’s already too much happening on my DT, I don’t wanna complicate that any further (plus I don’t wanna do sweeps with the encoder).
@JoyrexJ9: I‘m not too picky when it comes to these things, I guess the sound will be alright for my tastes. But yeah, probably better to wait a bit. When is this thing supposed to release?
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Good point.
It’s possible that it will have a 30mm fader travel like the sh-101, but I wouldn’t count on it. The L1 unit by itself (without the keyboard) doesn’t look that large to me (especially in height) but the width of the L1 is 450mm vs 300mm for the SH-01A boutique so what you’re more likely to get is significantly more room in-between the sliders and a significantly larger / grabbier slider cap, I think that’s apparent even without any real scaling or comparison photos between the two.
Considering that the slider travel length on the SH01A is actually longer than that of an MC-202, I don’t think that the boutique is too terrible in that regard, but you’re literally pinching it like a little peanut, or something else that you pick up gently and are trying not to drop, so it’s probably not very comfortable to use.
If you get the additional 8mm travel then proportionally it’s a pretty large increase in length, but since this model isn’t released until like May of this year, I don’t know that anyone who isn’t at NAMM with a tape measure or some kind of collapsable ruler will be able to give us any better assessment.
I’d like to believe it’s the full-sized slider, but my eyes aren’t good enough to pick out the difference of 8mm from a demo video and the issue is (for me) that the devices are in proportion to themselves, so unless it’s a really close side by side photo taken at the same time and at the same location, there’s really no frame of reference for how large something is in comparison to another device.
To me, the L1 does not look like a very large synth, however it is decidedly larger than a boutique in regard to the width so I do think you will obviously get that extra distance that allows the larger fader caps (16mm rise above deck height) and more room for fingers, however the dimensions for length (front to back) are 120mm for the L1 and 128mm for the boutique so when we’re talking about the physical size of the unit, in the direction of the fader throw, the L1 is 8mm shorter than the boutique therefore the additional 8-10mm of fader throw length which we’re looking for becomes less likely, however not impossible depending on how much priority donner put on that aspect of “cloning” or adapting the SH-101 to a more modern format.
So, I guess it remains to be seen, but I think that even if the faders are the same length, it will probably feel more useable. Luckily, it’s an inexpensive device so there’s not a huge pressure to sell the boutique before purchase.
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Thanks for the deep dive as always! I don’t mind the space between faders on the boutique and I don’t mind the fader length except for the cutoff. Besides the cutoff, the boutique is perfect in my book. As you’ve said, I‘ll just wait and see.
Does anyone know if there’s a quick setting to skip the second ADSR so that it’s just like the original 101? I usually hate if a synth doesn’t have two full ADSR, but 101 is such a good live machine because there‘s just one envelope.
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They said that envelope 2 is primarily for the VCA, if you look at the slider for VCA which they’ve moved all the way to the right next to the second envelope, the first option is envelope 2 and then you have gate, cycle and drone.
So, you can select gate which one would assume will bypass the second adsr, but SH-101 (instead of env 2) has gate+trig as an option, which is similar but normally there’s only a single envelope, so I assume gate+trig on the SH-101 is sonically referencing a different curve than setting the VCA to envelope 2.
I might be wrong, but that’s how I’m understanding it, so do your own research if it’s a make-or-break kinda thing for you, because I’m just interpreting rather than them exclusively stating this is different, I just don’t know the exact flowchart for the internal routing so I can’t 100% confirm that I’m reading it correctly.
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I think they mentioned in the namm demo that you can link the envelopes. Can’t watch the video to double check right now though.
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There’s definitely a button in the modulation section which says audio rate sync, maybe it has that function on one of the settings. That could definitely be true, I didn’t pay close enough attention to that part to confirm.
There is a way to set it up to use 1 envelope like the og 101
That audio rate sync just seemed to make the lfo quicker to get into fm territory. …well that’s what I heard in the few demos online.
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Incredibly uninspiring sound demo. The best thing about this thing is the detachable keyboard. Cool concept. Otherwise kinda meh.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a gear demo at a show that impressed me
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yeah I think the demo is fine for what it is. This looks way better than the Behringer to me, though I probably won’t buy either.
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The gear demo was whatever, but the sounds on the preorder page linked upthread are pretty good.