DREADBOX Nyx 2 £469

CHOICE AWARD 9/10

INNOVATION AWARD

Dreadbox is what you might call a bespoke synth company. It is just one of seemingly hundreds of relatively small enterprises trying their hands at – and largely succeeding at – making great hardware synths with a unique flavour.

Many of these, of course, make smaller units for the burgeoning modular market, but there’s an increasing number of all-in-one synths and semi-modular machines out there, too and Dreadbox’s Nyx 2 fits well into the latter camp.

Dreadbox is a Greek company and makes striking-looking gear. Its older machines include the Hades, Erebus and original Nyx – all names of Greek gods of the dead, darkness and the night respectively (you might see a theme here). That original Nyx was a stunning-sounding machine that, with a massive reverb, was also an ambientproducer’s delight. It also had complicated routing that took a while (or a degree) to master, but when you got the machine doing its thing,