[brandonmenc]

As someone who is pretty hyped up for the Kyra, this stuff is really just hype.

Hype, in the sense that it's anything more than a way to hit a higher level of performance at a smaller budget of dollars and/or watts. Which, is a fine goal. But you can have a gazillion more oscillators and way better resolution with a desktop-class processor. None of these new FPGA synths will sound better than Omnisphere - but they will sound way better than the previous generation of hardware synths.

There's kind of a backlash against laptops in music right now - ex: modular and the DAW-less trend - so tons of people want hardware, and plenty of them are yelling "FPGA! FPGA!" like it makes a qualitative difference. Seriously, people on synth message boards are like, "what would this sound like if we did it with FPGA?"

I admit that sometimes there is something intangibly great about using hardware versus a laptop - but it's mostly about the interface, not the sound engine.

[vertex-four]

> Seriously, people on synth message boards are like, "what would this sound like if we did it with FPGA?"

Ah, the blockchain of digital music.