The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ makes a ton of sense. In a way, it’s exactly the product we expected back when we first caught wind of something AI-related going on over at Pi Towers. The Hailo-8L is back once again, but it’s been evicted from its dedicated third-party module and now lives directly soldered onto a custom HAT+ board. And okay, there’s a surprise guest in this story too, but more on that in a second.
In the past issue, we’ve already had our hands on the excellent teenage engineering POM-400 synth and POM-16 sequencer, and after being blown away by how excellent and full of surprises they were, we were raring for more. Thankfully, the amazing folks at teenage engineering provided us with a review unit of the OP-Z and the first bit of expansion kit designed for it – the oplab module.
We’ve already talked a bit about the musical capabilities of the new modulars, but let’s give them a bit of a technical look. First, the oscillators produce pretty clean signals, all at 4 V peak-to-peak (±2 V). The saw has some tiny inconsistency in its output, but it’s nothing worth noting too much. The oscillators are 1 V/oct, which pretty standard.
teenage engineering is one of those companies that always jump into the market with an original take on a concept. Their OP-1 and OP-Z synthesisers (well, more than just synthesisers, but that’s off-topic here) have created a huge splash and are still considered the finest examples of portable digital instruments.
