Zynthian Outlet: Old, rare & historic zynthians from our lab & store

Hi @zynthianers!

For first time, we are offering some old, rare & historic units from our lab and store.

Walking the road of developing a project like zynthian is a funny thing, but you end owning lots of zynthians. Really! Lots! And you love all of them because they are part of the project’s history, and you love the project, so you love the zynthians and the history behind every one of them, etc.

But some day you open a drawer for taking a screwdriver, and ups … there are 2 old dusty zynthians there. And next you open a box hoping to find this TFT display that you want to test and s***t!! you only find an old zynthian prototype that you used for recording the first promo video. Finally you realize that perhaps you have too many zynthians here that you never going to use, so … why not giving an opportunity to all those beautiful machines to find a better owner, so they can feel useful and happy?

So here we go! As v4 kits are out-of-stock due to the global scarcity crisis that is seriously affecting the electronic industry (among others), it’s a very good moment for revising these old zynthians, cleaning the dust, replacing some broken encoder and finally burning & configuring a fresh SD image with the latest software. It’s a big pleasure when you boot a pre-v1 prototype and … voilaaaa!! you get the step sequencer running perfectly smooth, without a glitch. Great!!

We have repeated this process with a few of them, that are currently available on the zynthian shop at a very reasonable price. Some units are small v1 designs with 2.8′ displays while others have 3.5′ displays. Most of them have aluminum cases, but some have rock-solid steel-cases. Finally, all zynthians offered on the outlet are RBPi3 units, what means they have not as much computing power as the latest RBPi4-based units, but they still work perfectly OK with many of my favorite engines, including:

  • setBfree (Hammond Organ emulator)
  • Dexed (Yamaha DX7 emulator)
  • FluidSynth & LinuxSampler (SF2, SFZ & GIG soundfonts)
  • Aeolus (Pipe Organ emulator)
  • MDA ePiano (simple but good Rhodes emulator)
  • NoizeMaker (Virtual Analog Synth)
  • ZynAddSubFX (Virtual Analog Synth) => Most of the presets work OK
  • etc.

Perhaps you remember this unit, that was used for recording the first promo video and for showcasing the project in SONAR 2016:

It’s my favorite from this batch. You will find more on the zynthian shop.

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