Technos

The Technos Acxel Resynthesizer is an additive synth developed in Quebec, Canada during the late 1980s. Its architecture is based on sine-wave oscillators that are each assigned amplitude and pitch envelopes to form the component harmonics of a sound.

The major innovation of the Acxel was, according to Technos, resynthesis. The idea is to sample a sound and extract its harmonic content using the Acxelizer. This information is then used to assign parameters, including envelopes, to the oscillators.

The Acxel comes in two pieces: the Solitary and the Grapher. The Solitary contains the main guts of the machine, including the main CPU board, the oscillator boards, the sampling board, the Acxelizer board, the floppy drive, and the I/O.

The Grapher is the machine’s user interface and is what Technos highlighted in its advertising. It’s a vacuum-fluorescent display for status information and menus and a surface of touch-sensitive nodules, 2114 of which contain LEDs.

Here are some videos that were made at the time to introduce the Technos Acxel Resynthesizer: Read more…