Waldorf Kyra SE Seablue

Kyra is a uniquely musical and beautiful sounding synth engine

Physically, Kyra is perfect. Solidly built like it's meant to last decades.

The stock patches give an idea of Kyra's depth, but new ghosts in the machine are there to be found if you patch with subtlety and care.

I/O of 8 in 2 out over USB "just works" (at least on a Mac).

The audio at 96Khz sounds like glass. No clicks or pops of glitches.

I'm using the sigabort.co editor. It's not perfect, but it helped me get a better understanding of Kyra's architecture. It also lets me do a comforting backup of patches and configurations.

Things I wish for:

An update some day with new features. The synth is fine as is, but who doesn't like updates?

The white LEDS are *way* too bright compared to the display and the buttons, even at the lowest setting. Blinding at medium.

I like the blue of my SE model, but I wish that more attention was paid to the legibility of the non-backlit text.

The arpeggiator is sufficient, but considering how Kyra is table-driven, it could have been so much more. Same goes with the effects section and (everyone's favorite want) more modulation routings.

And finally, it makes me sad that there's no way to get any external audio of any kind into the box.

After all that, what Kyra *does* far outweighs any shortcomings.

There's hours and hours of play ahead.