The Sirius is Quasimidi's souped-up keyboard similar to the RaveOLution 309 and aimed directly at the dance market. It's filled with knobs, buttons and cool colors. Designed for total control for live performance or studio work!

Actually most knobs are dedicated to patch editing. It has a welcome new feature, a modern vocoder! There are also 8 control knobs for setting various mixer-type settings (level, pan, fx send). That's right, it has effects on board! It's got a great sound too! Choose from basic categories like 'bass sounds', 'dirty bass', 'pad sounds', 808 & 909 kits and much more! There's plenty of memory (96 user patches) to store your own creations. The filter and envelopes are flexible and sound very good.

Also taken from the Rave-O-Lution is the incredible pattern-based seven track sequencer with part mutes and tap-tempo! A truly useful dance music production synth capable for demanding studio use and creative live performance control with excellent sounds and a funky new vocoder! An ideal all in-one-synth for any DJ or dance musician! It has been used by KMFDM/MDFMK founder Sascha Konietzko.

Angels In Bondage

April 11, 2011 @ 3:36 pm

One of the best kept secrets for making this synth sound better is modifying the Overblast with a MIDI command in order to fix the EQing on this synth.

I would have to disagree with The .Invalid on how 'bad' this synth sounds today - listen to a few patches Jay B has made for it along with the Overblast trick -
http://www.jaybmusic.net/Sounds.php

although it does alias pretty badly, you just have to know how to make it alias the 'right' way

The .invalid

April 1, 2011 @ 7:28 pm

I should also add for the people arguing that since it's a full synthesizer that the only thing making it sound 'dated' are the presets - this is not strictly true.

The Sirius (unlike a lot of 'proper' synths) generates its sounds from sampled waveforms, and not true oscillators. If my memory serves me correctly, all the samples on board were 12-bit, and distinctively 'grainy' in sound because of this. This also had the side effect of most of the sounds producing horrible amounts of aliasing on the upper and lower octaves.

The .invalid

April 1, 2011 @ 7:08 pm

Had one of these, looks nice, but the sound is pretty bad. Produced a couple EBM tracks with mine before it bit the dirt - unfortunately the rotary encoders started behaving weird and parameters I swore I'd saved were recalled all messed up, all before a tragic accident where it got knocked over and would never power on again...
Anyway IMO the sampled waveforms are mostly crummy with a few exceptions, the filter sounds kind of weak even at 24db/o and... what the hell's with trying to cram the entire envelope section into one control and calling the resonance 'Q-factor'? Meh...

Angels In Bondage

March 29, 2011 @ 9:05 am

I remember thinking this board was pretty much the EBM version of a Roland MC505 when i first got it.

The sounds on this thing are pretty straight forward, the drums are still great to this very day for techno/ebm/industrial etc. The synth engine is pretty lacking (its weird romple sounding + some real synth elements that remind me of slightly better Emu-style synthesis)
Thats why i sold mine, and now adays i really wish i hadnt because this board was still fun to play and pretty good to write starting melodies on.

Vocoder was decent as well, used it for live performances

Sisela

March 14, 2011 @ 9:22 pm

Forgive me if i'm wrong, but if you fully expand the Rave-O, it's basically a Sirius is it not? It contains all of the waveforms and parameters. The only difference is the vastly less cool interface, lower polyphony and no vocoder. Think you can only use two synth parts instead of three, as well.

Anyway, this synth is a modern classic. Going to be a cult synth within ten years. Probably. Judged as a VA, it's average to good, but judged as it's own bubbling, whirring and clicking box of joy, it's second to none. Not had this much fun since the Blofeld. Satisfies all dancey drum needs, too.

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