I'm familiar with some of the pieces of this from having their Double Helix module, which is basically a West Coast synth minus envelopes.
Compared to the 0-Coast:
- This has some more classic East Coast flavors to its VCO.
- The wavefolder sounds better to my ears.
- There's a respectable East Coast LPF.
- The LPG, despite also being a non-vactrol design, has a more classic LPG sound and feel than 0-Coast's dynamics section. And there's also a clean VCA mode.
- In addition to the function generator, there's an LFO right there on the panel, not hidden in arcane button presses and taking over a useful output. It seems to have some cool sample & hold stuff that goes beyond the 0-Coast's stepped random generator.
- Overdrive on a knob instead of just happening at a low level in the background.
What's missing?
- Fat triangles -- something the 0-Coast is really good at.
- A curvature control for the envelopes. But at least on the function generator, you could feed its output back into its mod input to achieve that.
- A sync input for the VCO. This is missing on the Double Helix too and I don't know why.
But it's not like that one can't produce some fantastic sounds without it, so there's not a lot of pain there.- A blade wave output from the VCO -- all of Pittsburgh's other saw-core oscillators have it, but they skipped it here. It's really not a big loss.
- A sub output for the VCO. This doesn't exist on the 0-Coast either. You can patch a pseudo-sub using the function generator with a carefully chosen attack setting, but...
- EOR/EOC outputs on the function generator or envelope. This is useful on the 0-Coast for subs and PWM and some other things. You'll need a comparator or to overdrive the function generator's output if you want to square it off -- which might be possible by patching into both inputs on the Microvolt's mixer section using a Stackable.
- External control over LFO rate.
- External inputs for the sample & hold.
- Any external control over the ADSR.
- Bandpass or highpass filter modes.
- External input to the folder -- also missing on the 0-Coast and the Make Noise DPO, but present on the Double Helix.
Overall this seems more versatile than the 0-Coast, and probably more appealing to those who favor East Coast stuff. A lot of the omissions are things you could get with other modules, but not having them here too feels like getting one B+ on an otherwise perfect report card.
