We received an enormous amount of vintage synthesizer brochures, music magazines, documents, pricelists and more from old friend Kees Blom (big thanks to Kees!. It’s our plan to organise and scan all these materials and add some parts to our own archives, but a part will be distributed to our Synthforbreakfast fans. If you are interested please keep following us.
Synton Syrinx
The first brochure scanned is that of the Synton Syrinx.


The Syrinx was designed and built by Synton (please note that we have several posts about Synton and its chief Felix Visser on our website).
It isone of the few analog synths to come out of the Netherlands. It’s a monophonic lead synth in the same category as the Minimoog, Arp Odyssey, and Roland SH-7. But the Syrinx is pretty rare, only a few hundred were produced from 1983 through 1984.

The Syrinx uses seven Curtis chips for its VCO’s, VCF’s and envelopes. It has two analog VCO’s, a sub-oscillator and three flexible voltage-controlled filters. You can switch between the three filters for either a 24 dB lowpass, or two bandpass filters, and they can be patched in four different ways (series/parallel). Additionally the Syrinx has two LFO’s, FM, PWM, osc-sync, 2 ADSR envelopes, ring modulation, portamento and a cool touch-pad that can control various parameters from pitch-bending to the LFO rate. The Syrinx’s Mixer section lets you adjust levels for each VCO and the sub-osc as well as the Noise Generator and Ring Modulator. Unfortunately, being released around 1983, the Syrinx just missed out on MIDI and patch memory options.