Music Thing: The Polyvox duophonic Soviet synthesizer

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new pro music gear that's coming out these days. Last Saturday it was
Vestax's new Güber Cube-T CM-01 turntable, this week's its Astrasound's Polyvox duophonic synth and ESCO-100 tape-delay unit:

The history of vintage synthesisers is pretty short. A handful of companies — Moog, Roland, Korg, ARP, Sequential Circuits — invented and manufactured pretty much everything interesting. But there's also a parallel universe where those companies don't exist but loads of cool synths still got made.

That parallel universe was the Soviet Union, where, since 1982, military radio factories were producing ever-more-bizarre synths and effects for the internal market. Now that the market for any kind of vintage synth has exploded, Soviet gear is more affordable (and certainly more interesting) than it's US/Japanese equivalent.

Astrasound is a Dutch company that trades through eBay, exporting delights like the Polyvox – a great-sounding duophonic synth that folds into it's own aluminium case (they sell for $700). Or the ESCO-100, a tape-delay unit that looks like a Geiger counter from Chernobyl ($430). Synths aren't the only soviet throwback you'll find in a modern western studio. Almost every pro guitarist in the world uses a tube amp, and most tubes come from former military factories in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc. And Oktava have been selling weird-looking high-end microphones in the

west since 1994.