Waldorf Iridium (16-voice, duo-timbral Quantum desktop)

Yeah that makes sense. I don’t think this was a problem with Sweetwater, more likely something to do with Waldorf or their US distributor — my hunch was it was the distributor.

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That’s very interesting I’ll have to check that out.

Loopop video incoming, looks like he has wonky buttons also

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Just watched the whole Loopop video. Thought he gave it a fair workout and assessment. Seems to still have than its fair share of quirks, but I’m still pretty knocked out by the sound

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I’d say I’m still in the evaluation stage (due to having yet to grok the best way of tying it into my usage of the Analog boxes – I know. I need an OT, lol.), but here are a couple early patches:

3 oscillators (Kernel/ Resonator/ Wavetable) with 15 mod slots:

1 wavetable oscillator (in legacy mode) with 6 mod slots:

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How does the Iridium do with more traditional OSC types? Could you do away with something like a Peak with the Iridium? It obviously excels at the wavetable and kernel stuff and that’s what most of the videos I’ve see center around. I’m just wondering if people would still feel the need still for a more traditional ‘analog’ synth alongside it.

Sounded awesome and clever title :slight_smile:

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Honestly I haven’t dug much into the VA/ waveform engine.

The primary draws for me were:

  • the kernel engine
  • the 40 slot mod-matrix (with scale sources per slot)*
  • live granular mode
  • the CV connectivity*

Re: scale sources - a weird quibble I’m having with the scale sources is that they’re behaving a lot like sums (transposition), rather than a multiplication (scale) of 0 to 1. I still haven’t received word from support if this is intended behavior or no.

Re: CV connectivity - I’d hoped you’d be able to pull CV clock in and send the signal out as MIDI clock to slave other MIDI devices to, but it seems like that’s not a possibility yet.

haha thanks, man :slight_smile:

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All good! And yes, kernel, wavetable, and granular stuff is the main draw for me as well. The synth sounds amazing in that regard.

I don’t have anything above 4 voice poly outside of ITB synths. Nothing wrong with those, but I prefer hardware (even if it’s DSP based). I’ve been considering a Peak for a while now, but hoping the Iridium could serve that role as well. Not having a physical analog filter isn’t of a big concern for me.

I just haven’t heard any demos of more traditional bread and butter type sounds and that’s totally understandable. People want to show what’s new/unique about Iridium and not how well it can mimic a Moog or Sequential. I’m getting heavy on hardware again and it’d be nice to pick up an Iridium and be more or less covering that ground as well.

Yeah, I remember being a bit intrigued by the Peak upon its release (for the cleanliness of the audio rate modulation of oscs/ filter by WT oscs), but my interest waned significantly when I realized there was no option to pan voices independently. That there was only a single (non modulate-able) voice spread amount tucked away in a menu. This isn’t to say it doesn’t sound lovely, but yeah.

Honestly, I hadn’t really seriously contemplated picking up a (non-Elektron) digital poly until Hydrasynth was announced. I almost ordered one in May, but held off for whatever reason.

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I’m currently exploring the waveform section. The Iridium gives you all the basic shapes plus two noise types (white and pink) So far in my experience I’m liking it but not because of it’s ability to sound analog because it cannot. It does sound alive though, mainly because of its mod matrix which includes 6 lfos, 3 freely assignable envelopes plus a boatload of other potential modulation sources. There’s infinite options here. I have some slow moving lfos on detune and warp just to give it some instability and it sounds great to me but I enjoy the digital character. Don’t buy this if you are hoping to faithfully emulate analog because you’ll be disappointed but if you do accept it’s “digital” sound you’ll be blown away by its capabilities.

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I find myself gravitating towards pads only with this thing. Everything else feels like it’s underutilizing it.

Anyone make some unique plucks, leads, or bass yet that feels unique to this?

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It does look like a killer dream module for sure. But I don’t need all the options. However my hats off to Waldorf as I’m sure this is a killer from what I’m reading from those of you on here who have it. Unlike Wayne I will truly never afford it man. But I’ve got plenty of good VST’s to cover all the digital ground I could need and 2 analog mono synths for the cherry. And if I like what I hear on youtube I’ll just sample it from some demo of this thing. So thanks in advance to those of you putting out those sweet demo’s that I’ll be surfing through soon enough! Just to be clear, I don’t produce/copyrighted music, just mess around as a hobby, if I did I would not use anyone’s unlicensed samples or not get permission, unless it’s legal once mangled to a point of not resembling the original, but again if I ever produced a track and wanted to copyright it I’d be sure I was on the right side of respectfully paying the original producer the necessary, I can’t think of the term? Royalty.

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Still thinking of selling a few things to fund an Iridium. I don’t take part in any analog vs digital debates. It just doesn’t mean anything to me. My eurorack is mostly analog and it’s nice. My Kodamo EssenceFM is digital as all get out and it’s awesome. My Model:Cycles is genius at $299 and sounds fantastic. My Octatrack? Samplers kinda blur the line, depending on what’s being sampled, but that’s digital too. The Iridiums’ potential seems huge, regardless

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I’ve been playing with the digital former a lot and been getting pretty nice plucky sounds off the resonator over some simple saw waveforms warped into a square. Adding a square kernel to the second osc and some delay and reverb to take it into outer space. I’m love how snappy the envelopes are on this synth.

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Another thing I’m loving about this synth is the arp!!! You get 30 different rhythm variations apart from the regular algorithms plus a reset from 1-16. That’s a lot to play with! The release gate goes to zero, it sounds like needles tapping plastic when you go to zero.

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Looks like the 2nd batch is to be delayed. Thomann today changed the shipping from 4-5 weeks to 8-10 weeks. That will be around the end of september.

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