Ever since the Doepfer Dark Energy II was announced, people have been wondering how the new synth sounds, compared to the original Dark Energy.

This video does an A/B comparison. While both synths sound great, they do have very different sounds.

Here are the key differences between the Dark Energy 1 and Dark Energy 2:

• 12dB multimode filter with lowpass, notch, highpass and bandpass (instead of 24dB lowpass of Dark Energy I)
• the previous LM control of the filter becomes the filter type control Mode (continuous crossfade lowpass – notch – highpass – bandpass)
• the modulation level control of the filter “XFM” has so-called “polarizer” function. The modulation source (LFO2 or ADSR) selected by the Source switch may affect the filter frequency in a positive (right half of the control range) or negative way (left half of the control range)
• the waveform switch is used to select between saw and clipped, inverted saw (in the center position the saw is off)
• the basic waveform of the VCO is saw (not triangle like the Dark Energy I).
• the VCA has a exponential scale (not the combined linear/exponential scale of Dark Energy I)
• because of the pure analog circuit and the temperature control it may take up to 20-30 minutes until the VCO is in tune.
• The sound of the Dark Energy II differs clearly from the Dark Energy I (mainly because of the completely different filter type). If you already own a Dark Energy I, the Dark Energy II can be used as an expansion. But you will not be able to copy sounds of the Dark Energy I with the Dark Energy II (and vice versa).
• For users with electronic knowledge the Dark Energy II offers much more internal expansion features than the Dark Energy I. For example terminals (pin headers) for these features are available: VCO Hard Sync, linear VCO FM, rectangle and sawtoooth output of the VCO, lowpass/bandpass/highpass output of the VC, Reset/Sync/Direction for each LFO, rectangle and triangle output for each LFO. In addition an improved version of the glide option is is the planning stage that allows to turn on/off the glide function via Midi control change messages.

The Doepfer Dark Energy 2 is priced at Euro 428,00. See the Doepfer site for details.

Check out the audio demo and let us know what you think!