The Technos Axcel Mark 2 on sale soon?

Remember the Technos Axcel? Only 39 of the mind-bogglingly cool touch-screen resynthesizers were made in the early '90s (here's the essential Matrix Synth post on the Axcel). You can imagine how excited I was when this email arrived:
"I am Pierre Guilmette the Acxel inventor. Just a short note to tell you that we put an Acxel-II project on the rails, you can have a look on very preliminary information on www.idarca-audio.com and some rough sound examples that show the capabilities (some exaggerate effects for demonstration purposes). Any questions are welcomed. Best regards, Pierre GUILMETTE."
The new Axcel hardware is, rather disappointingly, not a huge LED-covered touchscreen tethered to a vast monolithic processor block. It's a PCI card, or a not-terribly monolithic 1U rack unit. As Pierre says, it's very early days, so I won't say too much about the sound samples.
Still, the spec promises optional 'touch screen graphic editing', so that will be fun once we've all got multitouch laptops.

A heartwarming story about the Technos Axcel

I just spotted this nice comment on my Engadget story about the Technos Axcel: Gocy writes: "I used to have a friend in the eighties that had one of these things, he was 17 and he had a fairlight II as well. He was the shadiest m.f. I've met and his fairlight used to crash all the time. Never knew how he got the cash. I remember this was like an astromic sum of 15,000 USD or more. I heard he got put in jail later for trying to stealing his own fairlight in some insurance scam. I remeber him trying to show me how the Acxel converted a sampled sound to synthes and it came out completly different or can I say turd like."

Not on eBay of the day: Technos Acxel

Dave has made me want a Technos Acxel, the fantastically rare and sexy-looking Canadian resynthesizer from the 1980s. The last time I ran a 'Not on eBay' story about the Movement Drum Computer, one appeared on eBay just a couple of weeks later, so lets hope the magic works again.

The most awesome synth demo you will ever see


I've mentioned the Technos Axcel in the past (super rare '80s super synth with amazing display/interface), but here is one in action, wonderfully demonstrated by a rather familiar-looking man who appears to have learned English phonetically for the purpose of this demo. Be sure not to miss Part 2 for the 'drawing waveforms with your finger' money shot.

Crimson Twins: They have all the gear in the world

Ever wondered what kind of music you'd make if you won the lottery, went mad on eBay and ended up with a Fairlight, a Technos Axcel, various Eventide Harmonizers, a Buchla 700, Synton Syntovox Vocoder, Yamaha DX1... and so on? Well, the Crimson Twins have answered that question. Their site contains dozens of MP3 files (which I suspect are very old - the reviews on the site date from 1990) made with the most enormous pile of gear. I'll leave the comments on the music up to you.
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