CHROMA POLARIS vs AKAI AX60: Live Sound Demo and Comparison!

video upload by Vulture Culture

"Tonight we're checking out two "cold"-sounding vintage synths from the 1980's LIVE! We're comparing the Fender Chroma Polaris, a 6 voice VCO analog synth and the Akai AX60 and 6 voice VCO analog synth! We'll start with the oscillators, check out the filters, the LFO's, arpeggiators, sequencers and all the other features of these two synths.

A big reason these synthesizers sound so similar is they both use Curtis Electromusic Specialties aka CEM chips. These "synths-on-a-chip" components were used as far back as the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 and Oberheim OB-Xa. They're known, especially the later chips, for sounding "cold" as far as analog synths go.

Specifically the Akai AX60 uses 6 CEM3394 chips, which contain a VCO, VCF and VCA on one chip. The Chroma Polaris uses 6 CEM3374 Dual VCO chips and 6 CEM3372 Filter, Mix and VCA chips, which is the same chipset used by the legendary Oberheim Matrix 12.

The biggest difference in terms of sound is the Polaris has two VCO's per voice but the AX60 only has one - BUT the AX60 has a trick up its sleeve. It has PWM on ALL waveforms, which lets you fake a detuned sound, as well as sounding beautiful in it's own right.

I'm really excited to see which of these two synthesizers reign supreme tonight! Scum one, scum all and scum as you are!"