Melbourne continue to push the (motorised) envelope with their latest polysynth.
‘The Synthesizer Revolution Begins Here’ declared Melbourne Instruments upon the release of their maiden instrument, the Nina. I reviewed that synth almost exactly a year ago, a formidable desktop unit sporting myriad statement features that, generally speaking, did not disappoint. I suppose, by that rubric, we’re more or less a year into that aforementioned revolution; not a bad time to take stock, and what better way to do that than with a successor? Enter Delia. A six‑voice keyboard synth blending digital and analogue with a distinctly less populous panel than its elder, the Delia (named, one assumes, after the great Delia Derbyshire) doesn’t so much take Melbourne Instruments’ grand designs further afield as it does substantiate them. But that’s by no means to say it doesn’t have more than a few tricks of its own.
The aforementioned ‘revolution’ of course refers to the Nina’s marvellous motorised knobs, which (spoiler alert) are present and correct on the Delia — improved, even. In fairness, and with pun‑based marketing aside, the design is a huge breakthrough and should absolutely be chalked up as such. For the unfamiliar: with the Nina, Melbourne Instruments managed to come up with a way to incorporate brushless motors into their synth design, meaning that the synth’s knobs could be programmed to move by themselves and thus end the plight that is unrepresentative physical values when switching presets. It’s a brilliant way to return a healthy dose of knob‑per‑function playability to a synth, no matter how deep it goes under the hood, and best of all, it really works.
Motorhead
That’s only the beginning, though. Melbourne are using motors with lightning‑fast responsiveness and incredible torque that can perform a handful of useful little computer‑driven tricks. They accurately assume any position on the clock face at the push of a button, for instance, and they can also move at different speeds, very slowly indeed if desired, to handle certain types of automation. I’ll explain that in more detail anon. Most fun to discover of all, they can also take on steps or detents to suit particular functions. It was an ambitious design decision, but in the Nina review I concluded that in the end it paid off. By the looks of things it has positioned both the Nina and its developer on a highly respectable stratum of the industry, and in record time.
One immediate stumbling block in all of this, of course, is the price. At £3650$3599, I’m pretty sure the Nina is the most expensive desktop synth I’ve played to date. For perspective, it’s got almost a £1000 on the desktop version of Oberheim’s OB‑X8 and £2000 on the powerful UDO Super 6 Desktop. (Best tack on a few pounds for electricity, too: the Nina requires 8A!)Best tack on a few pounds for electricity, too: the Nina requires 8A! I should point out, though, that the Nina’s price is not simply due to its motorised knobs. By any metric it’s a powerful instrument with an array of top‑spec functions; for one thing its circuitry is fully discrete, designed in‑house. Its 12 voices combine analogue oscillators with wavetable synthesis and Moog‑style ladder filtering; it has onboard drive, beyond‑stereo imaging for days, effects, and the rest. Melbourne Instruments, to their credit, went into that situation with both eyes open: “We’ve started at the top” they said at the time, and they weren’t wrong.
Trimming Down
So you can see why, on this occasion, for the developer to expand upwards would be unwise. And happily, they haven’t. For starters, the Delia lops a good £1300$1200 or so off the price tag of the Nina, and as you might therefore expect, shortcuts a few things where acceptable. Its panel has 22 knobs in total, 11 fewer than the Nina, and many of these have here become multifunctional. Even the inclusion of a velocity sensitive, aftertouch‑endowed keyboard seems to have done little to compromise the savings incurred, presumably, by things like including fewer motors.
But this isn’t to say that the Delia looks or feels any less impressive than the Nina, at least on a physical level. Its acrobatic knob‑turning startup procedure is just as satisfying, its build quality feels just as weighty. I personally am a big fan of its somewhat retro‑futuristic aesthetic, with shining metal side panels and big soft‑key buttons, whose key caps can also be switched out for those of different colours, sold separately. That might in fact come in very useful, since you need not switch out colours wholesale: you could colour‑code your buttons in any combination to suit your workflow.
Now, I’ll do my best not to spend this entire piece listing all the ways that the Delia is different to the Nina. It’s a natural temptation, the Delia being a follow‑up to the Nina and all; but its motorised knobs, while a headline function, are really one of only a handful of true commonalities between these two distinct instruments. Even these have been given an apparent tweak from what I can see — or rather, feel. Attention seems to have gone into adjusting the motors’ response to knobs reaching their extremities: with the Nina, it would feel like you were in danger of breaking something if you accidentally turned a knob too far into the brushless motor’s field of magnetic resistance. With the Delia, turn a knob beyond its highest setting and it will allow you to continue turning, it’ll just be a little more resistant. In many cases, for instance with the filters, it will jump all the way around and back to zero. Not that this was a deal‑breaker in the case of the Nina, but it’s a clear improvement in the tactility of what is still a nascent feature, and I commend that attention to detail.
Twenty‑first Century Architecture
A major distinguishing factor from the outset is Delia’s digital front‑end, with two DCOs per voice. These were undoubtedly another money‑saver but sonically, denote little compromise. At the most basic level, the oscillators do a good job of emulating their analogue counterparts (in this respect the Delia’s onboard digital oscilloscope is something of a flex, if nothing else), interpolating triangle, saw, square and pulse waves across the travel distance of the Shape knob.
The Delia measures 810 x 320 x 140mm and weighs a hefty 8.7kg. Lift with your knees, people!
Beyond this, the Delia leans further into the digital side of things. Oscillator 3, as with the Nina, is allocated to wavetable synthesis, a job it does very well indeed and at high resolution to boot. Each wavetable can constitute up to 256 waveforms of 2048 samples, and atop a host of factory wavetables to choose from it’s possible to load up to 127 custom wavetables in WAV format. It’s also possible to switch the interpolation of waveforms on or off for smoother or coarser motion, and through all of this the Delia’s screen provides a useful graphical readout of the wavetable motion (as well as a preview when scrolling through wavetables).
Oscillator 4 offers a choice of colour‑editable noise, external signal processing via the Ext L and R inputs and XOR; a widely accepted substitute for analogue ring modulation, often named the latter but here unashamedly labelled exactly what it is, which is in short a way to ring modulate the pulse outputs of oscillators 1 and 2 by sending them through a modelled XOR gate — that is, a gate which goes high only when the pulse outputs of oscillators 1 and 2 differ. Once again, no complaints here: it sounds great, and fans of the Korg MS20’s XOR circuit will recognise its distinctively fuzzy texture.
A Loop feature purportedly creates a simple feedback loop by routing the total analog output of the synth back into start of the voice, but I have to say I struggled to discern its role amid the other oscillators I had in the mix. Perhaps my expectations were heightened by my love for the wild feedback function found on many Sequential synths. Perhaps Sequential were on my mind because Delia’s Vintage Level control for modelling analogue unreliability appears to take its cue from the Dave Smith‑championed Vintage knob. I digress.
Add to all of this a sub‑oscillator and hard sync (a function I’ve always felt truly comes alive in the context of polyphony), and it amounts to one very powerful sound‑sculpting engine.
The layout of the oscillator section is nicely thought out, with buttons on hand to switch between oscillators and knobs therefore doubling up to handle, for instance, both wave shape and wavetable position. Similar to the Nina, the Tune knobs can be fine, with smooth motion, or magically become stepped to switch octaves with a hit of the Course button. Wonderful. The oscillator section is something of a microcosm of the Delia’s design: how, in a litany of instances, it does a fantastic job of saving space with multifunctional controls, but with no compromise whatsoever when it comes to workflow or functionality.
Filter Fun
Things become distinctly more hybrid in the Delia’s filter section, which presents some rather interesting voice architecture. The mix of Delia’s four oscillators flows into a digital high‑pass filter, before being fed into an analogue overdrive circuit and then into an analogue low‑pass filter.
If there’s one component of the Delia that feels a touch compromised by its digital‑ness, it’s the high‑pass filter, which just feels ever so slightly lifeless to my ear. It’s a comparison the Delia really brings upon itself by having such a nice‑sounding low‑pass filter, which I suppose is a good problem to have. That’s by no means to say I wasn’t happy to see the high‑pass filter, though, and it’s certainly useful. I’m reminded once again of the Korg MS20, a synth I’m beginning to suspect was somewhere in the vicinity during the Delia’s R&D phase, whose sound‑sculpting capabilities are expanded enormously by the (oft‑eschewed, for some reason) presence of dedicated knobs for both high‑ and low‑pass resonant filters. These of course gave way to the well‑known ‘rubber band‑pass’ filter, consisting of a literal elastic band stretched round both filter knobs so they could be linked. The Delia, as it would happen, has a button for this, and as you might expect makes good use of its motors to have one filter knob self‑turn as you adjust the other, depending on the relative values of the two.
The analogue low‑pass ladder filter offers switchable 12 or 24 dB/octave slopes, something the Nina’s 4‑pole ladder filter does not, and I must say steps in at a good moment to provide some punishable analogue warmth and grit. Punishable, that is, by the Drive knob, although fair to say it’s more of a scalding than outright sonic damnation. The Nina’s Drive knob is in fact more or less at unity at 12 o’clock, so values lower than this render it more like an attenuator for managing the oscillator ‘bus’ as it moves through the high‑pass filter and hits the low‑pass filter. Not hugely useful to someone like me, who would be more likely to manage the oscillator levels at source, but I can see how it might provide another useful layer of gain‑staging alongside tone shaping for those who like to really get into the nitty‑gritty.
Round the back we find quarter‑inch jack sockets for audio in and out, and expression and sustain pedals; full‑size MIDI in, out and thru ports; a USB‑C port and two USB‑A ports; and an input for the external power supply.
Polyphony, Doubled
As mentioned, the Delia is a six‑voice synth, with six discrete filters and VCAs. That’s half the voice count of the Nina, but I find in practice that six voices generally have me covered for most two‑handed playing; at least, they do for a 49‑key keyboard. But that doesn’t stop it from adding one or two other interesting applications of this architecture. The 12 Note Mode is a function that effectively doubles the number of voices, and in the process mitigates note‑stealing. Of course, the Delia only has six filters, so these are shared across those 12 notes. Each voice’s two oscillators, wavetable and fourth oscillator, along with sync, sub and applied modulation, are doubled and then sent in pairs to the six filters. I recently reviewed the PWM Mantis, which has a similar ‘quasi‑polyphonic‑paraphonic’ feature, only scaled down in that it can send four voices through its two analogue filters. Here, as with the Mantis, if you want to get the most from this function it’s really just a case of not using the filters too much. If your filter envelope is all but disengaged, it’ll more or less feel like playing a full 12‑voice synth. As for how notes are paired, with Delia there are various options to pair notes based on proximity on the keyboard or how closely in time they’re played.
Further to this, each of the Delia’s presets in fact consists of two layers, which can either be stacked multitimbral‑style, or split across the keyboard. Then, on the other ‘axis’, there’s Morph, a feature I sang the praises of when using it on the Nina and one I’m glad to see included here. This allows each preset to have two ‘poles’, so to speak, labelled A and B. Set parameters across the board with the Morph knob at A, then press the Morph button to enter B and set them entirely differently. Then, using the Morph knob, it’s possible to ‘fade’ between these two extremes and find new sounds in the space between them. Some parameters prove exceptions to this rule, for instance overdrive or effects settings won’t morph with everything else, but such limitations feel offset by the fact that even morphing has various modes to suit different workflows; including DJ Mode, where you can morph between sounds but with no accompanying knob movement, or Dance Mode (that’s right), where knobs will all move physically to represent their position in the morph, and the morphed sound can be edited as you go. You can also quickly assign any transient morph setting to the A or B slots on the fly, meaning that those two poles can also constantly evolve as you go. If by now it wasn’t obvious, a rather astonishing amount of attention to detail has clearly gone into the Delia, whose bi‑timbrality and morph combine to mean that any of its legion presets can in fact operate freely between more like four distinct sounds.
Marvellous Modulation
Further to my satisfaction upon seeing a dedicated high‑pass filter, I was very pleased to see an auxiliary envelope alongside the VCF and VCA ones; another function often overlooked in hardware synths, where envelopes can be just as useful and creative for controlling an array of parameters as they are for filters and VCAs. In this instance, the aux envelope also has a Slow mode, which slows its response down by a factor of 10 for much more gradual time‑based evolutions. A favourite auxiliary envelope application of mine is to have the depth and rate of an LFO — perhaps patched to control pitch — increase over the course of a note for truly lyrical moments of expression. This the Delia did with no problem.
On the subject of modulation, this is an area in which the Delia, like its elder sister, excels. The workflow is excellent: simply hit the Mod button and all parameters will snap to 12 o’clock. From here you simply select a modulator from the row of buttons below and turn any knob in either direction to modulate that parameter positively or negatively. Hit the Mod button again and things will snap back to their base values. The Delia in fact expands upon the Nina’s modulation capabilities by adding a third LFO into the mix, which is a welcome addition. Happily, it’s now possible to set Morph as a modulation destination. This function wasn’t available with the Nina at first, though I’m aware subsequent firmware updates have made it possible. In any case, it’s part of the Delia’s furniture and that can only be a good thing.
Beyond the features I’ve listed are the Delia’s many additional features, available via its lower‑most row of buttons, which I could go on listing but suffice to say they tie off what is a very well thought‑out instrument indeed. Its onboard arpeggiator and step sequencer are simple but both perform well and are accessible in a button push. Its two digital effects processors are flexible (both in themselves and in their ordering) and of substantial quality, with multi‑mode chorus, delay and reverb. Its screen menu system does very well to offer additional layers of options without requiring too much menu‑diving, and the choice to have an X/Y goniometer display or the oscilloscope hovering in the background of most (if not all) screens is both aesthetically pleasing and very useful.
The Delia performs excellently as a simple, robust and flexible six‑voice synth, and if that’s the extent of your need then don’t be ashamed of that fact.
Conclusion
Bi‑timbrality, Morph, 12 Note Mode: these features aren’t mandatory. The Delia performs excellently as a simple, robust and flexible six‑voice synth, and if that’s the extent of your need then don’t be ashamed of that fact. More, such functions are ready and waiting if needed; they make brilliant and generous use of what is really a fairly economical design when compared to the Nina. Where that synth threw it all at the wall, the Delia feels choice, more restrained and more streamlined. Not better, necessarily, but different.
Where the Delia does certainly pip its elder, I will say, is in its price. The Nina felt hugely powerful and therefore very expensive; the Delia announces itself as efficient, replete with features and good value for money. Far be it from wanting Melbourne Instruments to get more ambitious — I’m looking forward to the next synth being even smaller.
Pros
- Motorised knobs, and improved ones at that.
- Phenomenal flexibility and depth.
- Excellent design, with attention to detail and user workflow.
Cons
- I found myself wishing the HPF was analogue.
- Some functions contribute little to the workflow.
Summary
In the wake of the Nina, Melbourne Instruments have made all the right moves with the Delia. A streamlined, user‑friendly, brilliant‑sounding polysynth.
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