Hydrasynth Explorer

Picture this: a powerhouse synth engine shrunk down to backpack size, with battery power that lets you jam anywhere from a beach sunset to a late-night studio session. Released in 2021 as the portable sibling in Ashun Sound Machines' Hydrasynth family, it packs the same boundary-pushing sound design tools into a featherweight 7.5-pound frame measuring just 21.8 x 10 x 2.3 inches.

At its core, three wavetable oscillators draw from 219 single-cycle waveforms, with the first two featuring Wave Mutators like WavStack for detuned layers, hard sync, and pulse width modulation to twist sounds into wild new shapes. Dual filters—one with 11 types including Moog-style ladders and vowel morphing, the other a morphing state-variable SEM-inspired design—run in series or parallel, fed by five looping envelopes and five LFOs through a deep 32-slot mod matrix. A 37-note PolyTouch keybed delivers per-note polyphonic aftertouch, velocity, and MPE, plus a ribbon controller for pitch bend and mod, while 640 presets, arpeggiator with 60 scales, and lush effects (pre/delay/reverb/post chains with chorus, distortion, and more) round out the 8-voice polyphony. Stereo outs, headphone jack, CV/Gate, and USB/MIDI keep it connected.

Players love its expressive keybed and endless sound design potential—it's become a go-to for film scorers and live performers—but some miss the bigger screen and knob-per-function layout of the full-size models, opting for it when portability rules.