Formanta Polivoks | Vintage Synth Explorer

Formanta • Polivoks

The Polivoks is the most popular vintage Russian synth made in the early 80's - it was among the first synthesizers produced in the USSR. It had 2 oscillators with pulse or triangle waves, and 1 noise generator, the levels of which were controlled via the internal mixer. You could also connect an external input (guitar, electric piano etc) for mangling with the Polivoks' switchable high/low pass filter and LFO. The oscillators were unstable and difficult to tune, which means that the Poli is best suited to making screeching sounds or thunderous bass, both of which it excels at. One more thing though, if you buy one of these it would help if you can read Russian ;)

Check out this Panel Layout Translation to English.

Polivoks had been produced since 1982 by Formanta electronic factory (one of the biggest at the time); it was sold exclusively in the USSR. Polivoks has its own particular electronic parts, reliable keyboard (49 notes F to E) made in magnetically controlled contacts; synthesis modules consist of independent boards, which is convenient for maintenance. The synthesizer has 2-voices polyphony; each oscillator works with a keyboard note independently; two types of filters - bandpass/lowpass and external input for cutoff control. In addition, Polivoks is housed in an original body of uncommon design with handy controls. Being closed with a cover, the synthesizer turns into a strong aluminum case.

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KMFMTV

Posted 9 days ago

The description is pretty contradictory and sometimes incorrect. It has noise-generator and 2 osc each with triangle, saw, square and 2 types of pulse waveforms. You can choose from monophonic (both osc play notes just from one key) or duophonic mode (osc1 plays high note). It has 2 modes of the filter: low-pass or band-pass. "Modulator" gives you 4 waveforms: triangle, square, random AND (!!!) noise, there's a mistake here... You can apply it to oscs (both volume and tune) and filter (cut-frequency). You can also modulate Osc1 with Osc2. Both ADSRs have "one-take" and iterative modes, so in fact you can use them as LFO also.
About it's unreliability or bad assembly... that's not true, each 20-30 years old synth needs at least cleaning and recapping with changing electrolytes. If you restore it to initial condition, it will work and sound perfect!
Polivoks is very unique and amazing synth, so is one more Russian beast called Aelita.

Zak

Posted 48 days ago

I'm picking one up in March. If you need some samples of it's wave forms. Or even for me to do a bit of IR on the filters (it has an input) I'd be happy to.

Solderman

Posted 136 days ago

This is a great and unique sounding growler beastie. Its tone has an always-present tube-like saturation. The saturation increases with resonance, like an MS20, making it increasingly aggressive until it literally screams. I don't mind the clacky keyboard so much. It sort of has a mind of its own, especially after switching pitch range and waveform, and for tuning in duophonic mode. The only 3 problems I have with it are:
1)It's impossible to scale VCO 2 perfectly on mine - I get about 2 usable octaves at most
2)Several vital pots are so incredibly scratchy and filthy, live tweaking is not an option
3)The LFO speed range is very limited

It takes about 30 minutes to warm up into tune, the vertical switches feel kind of cheap, and nearly all the knob ranges are only about 40 percent used. It has crossmod(VCO2 to VCO1), but only seems to really work if VCO2 is a lower octave. It sounds monstrous through a keyboard amp. It’s freaky-deaky!

D.alvarez

Posted 315 days ago

These machines are trully amazing! Check out this video of it in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IMpElp0a_Q

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