I really wanted to like the Mirror. I really do.
Cannot say I was a fan of some of the Matriarch rehashing of the GUi. But this new instrument was the promess kept of a vintage vibey polysynth with some minimal preset mgmt. Seemed to be.
And as a beta tester I was more than delighted to get my hands and ears on a new era Moog *
I don’t like to say it, it’s like shooting a dead horse, but Oh man, was I disappointed. The core osc sound was weirdly weak (triangle core based VCOs. ) The whole lot of them came out untuned, like they were battling each others for center stage. At least they started to behave after the tuning procedure (c’mon InMusic guys, answer the f… phone when one of your beta tester is trying to get some important not to say sensitive info !)
If I was not so biaised I would have said they were
Timbre Wolf inspired, but that’s too an easy criticism, init ?
OSCs
When testing a new instrument, I get my fingers off the filter for a while to have a proper experience of the envelops first. But the filter was already there, taming the asthmatic voice of the VCOs. I plugged my oscillocope to catch a clear view on what was happening with the pulse - the worst offender, here. The image was so imbued with despair I won’t show it on this forum.
VCA-ENV
Now the envelops, as I said. They were off. Clicky for the first 10% of the Attack then astonishingly wheezy. Like some worker walking toward his obnoxious foreman knowing he’ld get fired anyway. Decay was behaving the other way. Release ? A liberation. Voice allocation like a kindergarten line up under a stormy rain.
I had to move on.
FILTAZ
Let’s try the filter,
the filters, one laddery, the other State Variable. Series and/or parallele. Well, so called states were : Inefficient, Temperamental (at least starting with the resonance at around 46,7%) and bland. Ladder was buttery, as usual for more than 50 years : a granny peacefully knitting her widow shawl away. Some harmonics appeared when hitting the VCOs harder into the filter, in a untammed and mostly unpleasant way.
And that’s when the fans entered stage…
CONCLUSION
Well, at least I don’t have to ask for a refound and it took me 2 days to deliver the most detailed and honnest debriefing I could spit out ; but as you geet the idea from now on, there’s still
a lot of work on that Mirror for it to reflect more than rushed mediocrity with dubious colors.
I didn’t have time to get into the modular i/o and wasn’t asked for, anyway.
A friend of mine working for a InMusic subcontractor told me something about Moog’s silence following the infamous Huang-o-Bowl marketing stunt, like they better get their shyte together before going any further.
As I consider myself a good chap, I wish them luck. But one bit of advice I shared with them : forget about branding the Mirror a Moog product.
*partly new : some of the pre-debacle union’s engineers were involved. It’s said some are seeking position in the arena-big events lighting industry.
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