I think it’s hard to overstate how excellent a product the Sinfonion is. A handful of bum units have reached customers, and the first batch with the original firmware has a bug related to the internal clock divider—we early adopters are still awaiting a little doohicky from ACL that we need to update our firmware—but otherwise, the Sinfonion has been utterly solid. Last I checked there are zero known bugs in the current firmware.
A lot of people seem to misunderstand Sinfonion and assume it is a sequencer—it is not really a sequencer, although it does have an arpeggio generator and a chord generator. Rather, Sinfonion is a quantizer that happens to include its own state sequencer. The state sequencer (which they call a chord sequencer, but that undersells it) enables you to clock through programmed multi-part changes to the scale, per-part active notes, and other attributes shared by its three quantizers, chord generator and arp. You are not obliged to use the state sequencer: instead, you can play the Sinfonion manually with all those buttons and dials, and you can animate the Sinfonion’s state in many ways using CV signals. In fact, if you merely dial in the root and degree you want, Sinfonion acts pretty much like any basic quantizer with the little keyboard, except that Sinfonion uses 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, etc. instead of imitating the white and black keys of a piano. (And yes, you will probably find the Sinfonion way superior once you try it.)
The radical idea behind the Sinfonion challenges the common operating assumption that sequencers are responsible for producing quantized notes for your oscillators. The first problem with that assumption is that it makes life tricky to get multiple sequencers and performance controllers (human sequencers) to all simultaneously agree on the same scale to play together in. The second problem with that assumption is that it’s virtually impossible to change scale on the fly once you solve the first problem—there’s just no avenue for coordination. Enter Sinfonion, which quantizes (re-quantizes where necessary) all the pitches downstream, providing a switchable, playable, sequence-able nexus of coordination. Now you can actually play your modular alongside your automation. With the Sinfonion, everything that produces a pitch quantizable signal—your joysticks and touch controllers, your keyboards, your sequencers, your LFOs, your random sources—are equal sources for musical gesture. Sinfonion glues them to together. The fact that you can also string multiple Sinfonions together—even across a room—to extend the model is wild.
Sinfonion is big and expensive, and it’s not for everyone. I think we’re already seeing its influence, however. For example, Shakmat has recently announced the Bard Quartet, which is smaller, cheaper, and adapts the core idea into quad quantizer package.
