Hey all,
As some of you may have noticed summer is here and the XS is not
shipping yet.
Several reasons for this...
For one, the european union is requiring all electronics imported to
be lead free after July 1 of this year, and other countries are bound
follow. Europe is quite a big portion of FR sales. Not all of the
components we wish to use in the XS design are lead free at this time,
although I believe all the component manufacturers are working to
update their parts to meet these requirements.
The good news... is that we are taking this time to add more features
to the XS specs.
The changes we are working on include, adding MIDI, more filter types,
and a new distortion stage. Yes, you will still be able to use
CV/Gates to trigger everything in the XS, but with the addition of
MIDI we will provide the ability to repond to pitch bending, velocity
for manipulating envelope times, mod wheel for filter cutoff (so you
can record filter tweaks in a sequencer), and we are currently working
on a dedicated LFO which would be capable of MIDI clock sync.
The original filter specs gave just high and lowpass resonant
responses, now we are adding bandpass, and notch as well.
And the new analog distortion stage is sick, providing maximum crunch
without adding any to the noise floor.
So for now, all we can say is the release date is being pushed back to
more like this fall if everything goes as planned. We will post more
information about the XS on our website as we get closer to it's release.
Thanks,
Jered Flickinger
