Quick round-up of the info I got from looking at the three new Elektron utility boxes.
Overhub 2
Nothing particularly interesting to me. It’s a usb hub with usb-c ports it has an SD card reader built in.
Powerhub
What’s so interesting about a 6 port usb-c power supply? Why not buy something from Anker or UGreen? Well the ports on the Powerhub are isolated, so it won’t introduce the noise you get from the standard ones. MyVolts are the only other company I know of who have a product that does this. Theirs costs €299 this costs €89. It’s out in June I think. If it works as advertised it’s a no brainer for those setting up a compact live rig or even a desk rig and you want to consolidate your power supplies.
140W total, up to 30W per port. Tonverk pulls 15W for point of reference.
Elektron are also going to sell nice usb-c to barrel plug cables.
Outbox 8
8 x Mono balanced 1/4” jacks, one usb-c data port, one usb-c power port.
Works with any Overbridge compatible Elektron box, including the Tonverk by the time of release. They showed it with the Digitone II which had a new menu you select how you configure the outputs and what tracks you assign to each output. You can assign multiple tracks to the same output. You can use the existing menu to add/remove tracks from the main device’s master out. Outbox8 has no inputs. You can combine pairs of outputs into a balanced stereo outputs (max four), you can carve off outputs from the right hand side to be CV instead and there was a menu to select the specifics for CV.
Also out June, I think. There seemed to be a little confusing at the booth whether they release price will be €249 or €299.
I asked what the Outbox8 latency was like and I was told it’s exactly the same as the device’s own stereo out. So if you record both the output from Outbox8 and the stereo out and compare the waveforms they would be perfectly sync’d. I was really surprised by this and if it’s the case I’m impressed. I double checked that I’d understood correctly on this point.
As far as I know you can’t use multiple Outboxes on one Electron box, so think of this as buss outputs rather than individual track outputs. That way you won’t be disappointed by only 8 mono or up to 4 stereo outs. It’s nice that they’re balanced 1/4” outputs.
I was told the Outbox8 is essentially an output-only audio interface with Overbridge drivers built in. So you can also plug it into a computer or an iPad and you’ll have 8 outputs for that.
Obvious use cases are to have separate output busses for drums, lead, bass, pads, etc. You could separate the kick on a mono output, but also have it in a stereo drum buss with your other drums, so you’ve got an isolated kick for side-chaining into a master compressor. You could use Outbox8 outputs as FX sends off to pedals and then bring the returns back into your device’s audio inputs.
They did say they might do an Inbox8 if this is well received and could see the utility of that for the Tonverk.
I mused over how the new menu for assigning tracks to Overbridge outputs for the Outbox8 is the foundation needed to enable, for example a Digitakt II, to send audio over usb-c to the Tonverk acting as an Overbridge Host. They were interested to hear why I’d want to do that and my intuition is that I wasn’t describing anything they hadn’t already been thinking about. I asked if they were playing with this already but it was something they couldn’t talk about.
These strike me as very well thought out boxes and the built quality feels good. I hope they live up to the info I received.