Waldorf Iridium Digital Polyphonic Desktop Synthesizer

Sound structure
An Iridium patch starts with its 3 oscillators, each of which can be assigned any of the 5 synthesis modes described below. The oscillators' output then passes through Iridium's filters, Digital Former, amplifier and up to 5 assignable effects, maintaining a true stereo signal throughout. Parameters across the entirety of this signal path can be affected by a variety of modulation sources, including traditional envelopes and LFOs as well as the Komplex Modulator and a 40-slot mod matrix.

Waveform Oscillator
Here you'll find traditional analog synthesizer waveforms, including sawtooth, triangle, square/pulse and sine. Individual oscillator waveforms can be synced, detuned and spread across the stereo spectrum, while their actual waveshapes can be further affected and mangled by sweep-able, modulate-able Shape and Warp parameters.

Resonator
Derived from the principles of physical modeling synthesis, Iridium's Resonator starts with an 'exciter,' which can be a noise impulse of varying length or even an audio sample, and then sends that impulse into a bank of resonant bandpass filters. Extensive controls are provided for both sections, including exciter source/length and resonator Q, Q curve and spectrum skew.

Sampling and sample playback
As noted in the sections above, Iridium's Particle Generator, Resonator and Kernel oscillator modes can all work with audio samples in various ways. Iridium comes loaded with a wide variety of samples in its 2GB onboard memory and you can load your own from a microSD card or USB storage device. New samples can be recorded directly from Iridium's stereo 1/4" inputs, analyzed, edited and looped using the color touchscreen and then saved to memory for immediate use.

Effects
Each patch can use up to 5 effects slots, with each assigned effect offering a deep selection of parameters that can be visualized and edited on Iridium's color touchscreen. Available options include chorus, reverb, delay, phaser, flanger, parametric EQ and compressor.

Panel and touchscreen
Iridium makes the most of its top panel real estate with dedicated controls for various parameters across its 3 oscillators, dual filters, mixer and Digital Former along with shared controls for its multiple envelopes and LFOs. Surrounding its color touchscreen are 8 dedicated buttons to select modes and 6 soft knobs to control adjacent onscreen parameters, while the touchscreen itself provides tremendous visual feedback for various waveform and spectrum displays and allows direct touch manipulation of numerous parameters in its rich onscreen graphical representations.

MIDI and CV/gate
In addition to a robust MIDI implementation that allows various CCs to act as mod matrix sources, Iridium also exposes the mod matrix and various parameters to input from its 4 CV inputs and gate input. Additional clock in/out and start in connections allow you to control and clock Iridium's arpeggiator and sequencer from external analog sources.

Patch compatibility with Quantum
Besides the obvious physical differences in size and onboard control, Iridium also differs from Waldorf's flagship Quantum keyboard synthesizer in areas like voice count and onboard filter design, but the fact is they have more commonalities than differences, sharing their basic sound structure as well as the 5 synthesis engines, which means that differences notwithstanding patches may be freely transferred between Iridium and Quantum with full compatibility.