Rob Papen just dropped Quad-2, the successor to his 2014 Quad synth, and I have been poking at it all week. The core idea is still the same but sharpened: two oscillators built on phase distortion and wave shaping, with an XY pad on each one. If you like synths that growl before you even touch a filter, this is your kind of playground.
The hands-on angle is what got me. There is a proper ribbon controller now with its own 12-slot modulation matrix, and the XY pads can be driven from the mod matrix or the ribbon. Mapping the ribbon to the shaper amount and dragging a slow pass across it gives you those crushed, metal-scraped industrial sweeps that sit so well under a distorted bassline. There is also a U-WAVE editor where you draw your own waveforms by hand, which is the kind of thing I will lose an hour to without noticing.
The filters are no joke: 43 types including the Albino-3 Legend Cream Filter, two of them with independent envelopes, routable serial, parallel or morphing. The arp got a real upgrade too, with ratcheting and sequencing modes plus a Free row aimed at the oscillators' XY fields. And the FX section reads like it was made for my kind of music: three slots, 48 effect types, and 33 of them are distortion flavors, with tape delay, reverb and a TalkBox in there as well. With 1200+ presets you will not starve for starting points either.
Honest caveat: this is a paid version 2, $49 new or $25 if you own the original Quad or the Quad-RE. If you bought Quad after July 1 this year the upgrade is free. It is also bundled into the eXplorer-11 pack at no extra cost if you are already on that.
Price: $49 / 49 EUR; $25 upgrade for Quad/Quad-RE owners
Company: Rob Papen — robpapen.com — product page: robpapen.com/Quad-2.html