The C25 is the new performance synthesizer from Berlin's Nonlinear Labs, shown as prototypes at this year's Superbooth with production expected to begin next year, and its entire design answers one question: what does a digital instrument feel like when every part of it exists to serve a pair of hands? Watch before reading, because the argument is physical:
Start with the keyboard, because it's the headline. The semi-weighted Fatar keybed is fitted with Nonlinear's own continuous sensors, so every key reports its vertical position, its velocity, and its polyphonic aftertouch. Each key becomes a modulation source of its own; the keyboard stops being a switch panel and becomes a sensor field. Around it sit the Bender, a new spring-loaded Lever with magnetic return, two touch ribbons striped with 33 position LEDs apiece, four pedal inputs and four CV inputs, all of it freely assignable to macro controls. Expression isn't a feature bolted onto this synth. The synth is what happens to be attached to the expression.
The engine is called Phase 22, and it braids phase modulation and FM with waveshaping, physical modeling, and subtractive synthesis, run through feedback routing that behaves like a living thing. Every parameter is continuously morphable. Forty-eight voices at 48kHz, or twenty-four at 96kHz, split and layer modes, two banks of five studio-grade effects, and a built-in recorder that captures hours of lossless audio, your performance kept at full quality without a laptop in the room. It's also fully compatible with the preset library of its predecessor, the C15, a decade of sounds carried forward rather than orphaned.
The knobs deserve their own paragraph. Six endless potentiometers, each with a touch sensor and a magnetic actuator for haptic feedback: physical resistance conjured by software, so your fingers get told what the sound is doing while your eyes stay on the room. There's a bright 7-inch screen now, with touch, but there is a hardware button for every single function, which is the whole instrument's philosophy in one design rule. Twenty-four selection buttons jump straight to any part of the engine, and their labels are printed on a replaceable overlay, because the C25 is built as a platform that will host synthesis and effect engines from third-party developers. Read that again: a hardware instrument designed to outlive its own sound engine. Most of this industry builds obsolescence in. This one is built against it, in a compact, lightweight, road-ready housing, with most components manufactured in Europe and durability named as a design goal. And yes, there's MIDI in and out, plus USB host and device and a proper stereo audio interface.
Here's what it sounds like doing its job, played live in a trio at the same Superbooth:
No price yet, and it won't be cheap; instruments built like this never are. Nonlinear Labs will document the road to production on a development blog, the current renders and full preliminary specs live on the C25 page, and the C15 remains orderable for anyone who can't wait. Follow the build on YouTube and Instagram.
