Hideaway Studio Polivox £22

Hideaway Studio is a boutique sample library creator centred around the electronic engineering and vintage synth specialisms of Dan Wilson. As well collecting weird and wonderful old sonic devices (Dan is famed for restoring a ’30s Hammond Novachord), as synth engineer for Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory, he has the good fortune to play with other interesting keyboards. Most of these form the basis of Hideaway’s sample libraries. All require a full version of Kontakt, and usually employ simple interfaces. Based on my purchases over the years, it is the sonics that count here, and it is on this basis that we explored the new Polivox. This collection is based around the Formanta Polivoks, a Russian, Soviet-era analogue synth. The Polivoks was duophonic and famed for its filter section and looping envelopes. You also needed to be able to read the Cyrillic alphabet to know what any of the controls do!

Hideaway have distilled some of the flavour of this synth, extruding its output into a series of 64 instrument presets that use nearly 700MB of sample data. These can then be tweaked via the custom interface (that defaults to the Cyrillic typography, though with the ability to embrace English if you can find the secret button) and there is a decent amount of customisation on offer, though some menu diving required.

Overall, a good value instrument with interesting and usable presets, and a worthy addition to the Hideaway family. Bruce Aisher hideawaystudio.wordpress.com VERDICT 7.9