Hampshire Electronics’ Apollo and Janus are two new polyphonic synth voices for Eurorack, each running two engines at once, eight voices per engine, with twelve selectable synthesis types. They share the digital architecture of the company’s Vulcan MK2 — a 24-voice module with eight analog voices and two digital 8-voice synths — minus the analog voices.
The engine list is the specification
Twelve engines, and the set is unusually broad for one module:
- V-Analogue — two oscillators with sync, sub and unison
- FM — six-operator, DX-style, with the full bank
- Modal — struck, plucked and bowed resonant bodies
- String — Karplus–Strong plucks, bows and blows
- Drums — nine tuned drum voices
- Tonewheel — a nine-drawbar organ with percussion
- Wavetable — morphing wavetables with a position LFO
- Phase Dist — CZ-style phase distortion
- Additive — partials, tilt, odd/even and comb
- Formant — vowel and voice synthesis
- Waves — the four classic shapes, done properly
- Noise — white and pink through the engine filter
Several of those are not variations on a theme. Six-operator FM, Karplus–Strong, modal resonators, CZ phase distortion and additive synthesis are fundamentally different ways of producing sound, each historically sold as its own instrument. Having them in one module is less “a lot of presets” than “several instruments, one panel.”
The feature that makes the pair worth more than the sum: engine 1 can cross-modulate engine 2 by FM or AM. That turns the second engine from a layer into a modulator, and it means the twelve engines combine rather than merely coexist — Karplus–Strong frequency-modulating a wavetable is not a sound either engine produces on its own.
The granular stage is the unusual part of the signal path
Each engine gets a multimode filter (LP/HP/Band/Notch) with drive and a VCF envelope. Then both engines hit a granular engine that granulates them together, with position, size, density, pitch, spray, texture, freeze and random.
Putting granular processing after the voices rather than on a sample is the decision worth noticing. Granular synthesis is normally applied to recorded material — you load a buffer and scatter it. Here the buffer is being continuously written by two polyphonic synths, which means the grain source is live, harmonically coherent and under your control. Freeze on a chord that the synth is still playing, and you get a sustained texture whose content you chose rather than found.
After the granular stage: age, bit-crusher, phaser, delay, reverb, chorus and glitch, in stereo.
Modulation is a 16-slot mod matrix fed by LFOs, sample-and-hold, random, envelopes and probabilistic gates.
Apollo and Janus differ in how you play them, not what they do
The engines, filters, granular and effects are identical. The difference is connectivity and playing model.
Apollo — 19HP. A main encoder and five knobs, a larger display, minijack MIDI IN/OUT, four 1V/oct and gate inputs, four CV ins, two mod outs, stereo out. It can be played from a MIDI keyboard or from four sequencer tracks at once, as an 8-layer multitimbral polysynth.
Janus — 10HP. No MIDI. A single 1V/oct and gate pair, two CV inputs, two mod outs, stereo out. Instead of multitimbral layering, it uses the available voices to form chords or arpeggios from one pitch CV and gate.
That is a genuine fork rather than a feature ladder. Apollo is a polysynth that happens to live in a rack and wants a sequencer with four tracks or a keyboard. Janus is a Eurorack voice in the traditional sense — one pitch in, a lot of sound out — and it is the one that fits how most modular patches are actually built, where you have one sequencer output and not four.
Both share a polyphonic arpeggiator plus harmony and strum, and both store presets recallable by Program Change.
The honest caveat
Twelve engines, per-engine filters and envelopes, a 16-slot mod matrix and a granular stage with eight parameters, on a panel with one encoder and five knobs, means menu-diving — and Synth Anatomy flags it as the one thing that would bother them.
That criticism is correct and worth taking seriously, because the appeal of Eurorack is largely that a parameter is a knob you can reach during a performance. A module with this much inside it cannot expose all of it, and the usual outcome is that you find three or four patches you can navigate and never touch the rest. Whether these are instruments or sound sources depends almost entirely on how well the menu is organised, and that is not something a feature list can tell you.
There is also no demo for either module yet.
Price
Pre-order at introductory prices of £329 (Apollo) and £219 (Janus), rising to £349 and £239.