At the Musikmesse 2018 exhibition, an independent developer Manuel Caballero, who started the creation of his own super-synthesizer Valkyrie under the Exodus Digital brand, presented a working prototype of his instrument.This was done, among other reasons, to find a partner who would help bring the instrument to the broader market.The exhibition was extremely successful for Manuel and such partner was immediately found, it was a very respected German company Waldorf, whose director considered Valkyrie one of the most exciting instruments of recent years. And recently it was announced that the Valkyrie developments will be used in the new analog modelling synthesizer from Waldorf, which will be named Kyra.

Waldorf Kyra is the first serial synthesizer to be fully developed on FPGA chips. These chips are quite inexpensive, and therefore make the production process significantly cheaper, in addition, they are programmable, which means manufacturers can update the instrument even after its release.

As for the characteristics of the Kyra, there you’ll find a 128-voice polyphony, each voice has 10 very high quality oscillators (32-times oversampling) and a wavetable engine, based on which you can get 4,096 waveforms. The instrument supports eight-part multitimbrality, and each part has its own effects section, consisting of:

• a three-band equalizer;
• a formant filter;
• a distortion;
• a double limiter;
• a six-stage phaser;
• a digital stereo delay;
• a programmable reverb;
• a chorus / flanger / doubler module.

Kyra also has emulations of classic analog filters of various configurations in extremely high resolution, and two filters can be simultaneously used in Dual Voice mode, which opens up wide creative possibilities. Among the modulation capabilities of the instrument there are 3 envelopes, 3 stereo LFOs (low frequency oscillators) with 64 waveforms and the ability to synchronize with MIDI clock, frequency (FM) and ring (RM) modulation. In addition, the synthesizer has an arpeggiator, 18-channel switching matrix and the possibility of microtone keyboard tuning.

The device has 4 balanced stereo outputs with 32 bit / 96 kHz parameters, headphone output, DIN MIDI, USB MIDI, and the ability to transfer audio via USB.

The Namm 2019 exhibition, where this synth is going to be presented, will take place on January 24-27 in California, the preliminary cost for desktop/rack version is € 1899. However it is also planned to release a version with a keyboard and here a small intrigue kicks in - how Waldorf is going to separate its competing products - Kyra and Quantum, and will they be rivals at all. We are waiting for some more detailed information about both synthesizers to make a more complete comparison.