Most synths that call themselves hybrids mean something narrower than they let on: digital oscillators, plus a filter modeled after an old analog circuit, still entirely inside a chip. Ashun Sound Machines' Leviasynth Desktop actually runs two filter stages in series, and only the second one is digital in name only. Sound starts in eight algorithmic oscillators per voice, gets shaped by an 18-model digital filter carried over from the Hydrasynth line, then gets pushed through a genuine analog pre-drive circuit into a physical four-pole low-pass filter with real self-oscillation. Almost nothing in that back half of the chain is simulated.
Sixteen voices, eight oscillators each, is the headline number, but the more interesting part is what ASM calls algorithms: ways of routing those eight oscillators to modulate or carry one another, borrowed conceptually from FM synthesis but built around phase modulation, linear FM, pulse width modulation, HTE sync and three flavors of phase distortion. There are more than 140 preset routings and room to build custom ones, and a morph function that steps through eight chosen algorithms and blends between them in real time rather than jumping. That's a genuinely different sound-design problem than turning a filter cutoff knob, closer to rewiring the instrument's internal signal flow while it's playing.
The desktop format strips out the 61-key semi-weighted keybed from the Leviasynth Keyboard and replaces it with sixteen Polytouch pads carrying polyphonic aftertouch, plus VESA and 19-inch rack mounting for anyone building a compact, keyboard-less rig around a separate controller. Everything else- the modulation matrix, the touchscreen, the three-track sequencer and eight-mode arpeggiator with ratchet and probability controls- carries over unchanged from the flagship keyboard version. It's the same engine ASM built to follow up the Hydrasynth, just in a footprint meant for a studio that already has a keyboard it likes.
It lists for $1,799 at Perfect Circuit, a few hundred dollars under the keyboard model, for an instrument built entirely around the idea that digital precision and analog grit don't have to trade off against each other so much as get stacked in order.
