Stylophone CPM DS-2

The Stylophone CPM DS-2 in detail

With the CPM DS-2, Stylophone presents its first drone synthesizer, which attracts attention with a varied sound and high functional density. With a drone synth you can create continuous tones, sound collages, weird sound clusters, enigmatic sounds and effects. The sophisticated interconnection options and wide control ranges ensure plenty of variety before an external device or module is used. In terms of sound, the CPM DS-2 covers the usual repertoire of its genre, produces authentic bassline drones and can even sound similar to a Phaser in some settings. The internal effects and patch sockets extend the potential many times over. The thoroughly analog sound generation is based on two oscillator/filter groups with the same structure. Each oscillator has three crossfadeable waveforms (square/triangle/sawtooth); there is also a sub-oscillator with a square waveform that oscillates one or two octaves below the frequency of the oscillator. The volume ratio between the oscillator and sub-oscillator is set with OSC Mix. Optionally, the pitch or waveform can be modulated with the LFO. The voluminous basic sound is achieved by a new CEM3340 chip, which was originally also used in classics such as the Roland SH-101. The oscillator mix is followed by a resonant filter with lowpass/highpass characteristics. The filter chip is also a newly produced CEM3320 chip, which was used in the past in the PPG Wave 2 or polyphonic Oberheim classics, among others. The filter can also be modulated with the LFO. So that not everything is equally loud, the level of each VCO/VCF group can be adjusted individually, which extends to overdrive. The oscillator mix finally ends up in the effects mixer. Here, the charismatic, analog LoFi delay and the digital Reverb effect with eight algorithms can be mixed in. The LFO section is a special feature, as there are two waveform groups with seven different waveforms each, which are set with a common frequency. The two waveform groups can be assigned separately to the five modulation destinations OSC 1 & OSC 1 (each Pitch or X-Wave), Filter 1 & 2 (Cutoff) and Delay (Time) using a switch. The many patch sockets invite you to use the CPM DS-2 together with a semi-modular synthesizer, an analog sequencer or a Eurorack modular system. The drone synthesizer can be removed from its housing and installed in a Eurorack housing, where it occupies 42 sub-units and is supplied with power via the system bus. The signal output is via headphones, line output or the internal loudspeaker.