MusicRadar

The Restlyer's controls are well-spaced and comfortable to use.

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• Review

Master and slave

When any of the slope buttons are down, the Restyler enters dual filter mode. This uses a master and slave frequency to act on the incoming audio.

Between the three band faders and slope buttons there are 24 combinations of filter response. This is where one of the more unusual features begins to come into play. Each band has two LEDs, which blink between blue-master and green-slave states. This is to indicate which of the two filter dials will have a more powerful effect on the signal at that moment in time.

The intention of this is to guide you to turn the best dial without having to think about it. This sounds good on paper, but in practice it can easily cause confusion..

The problem is that you're not told which direction to turn the proposed dial to take advantage of the available frequency range. This is never obvious, and a slight turn can cause the LEDs to switch over to the other state, implying that you'd get more out of the other knob. Our instincts would take its guidance with a pinch of salt.

Summary

There's a lot to like about the Restyler - it has a different sound to the Filterbank that is both clear and musically precise. It's easy to set the controls up to do basic single band filtering, but the main thing to watch is level matching.

This filter has a lot of gain, and with the resonance turned up, it can output much louder than the dry signal. It even comes with a warning of potentially dangerous signal levels, so for safety, put a limiter next in the chain.

The Restyler has a very wide frequency range, the filter wheel is very even, and having the bigger dial makes for better physical resolution. The circuitry introduces a little bit of noise on the wet mix – this is noticeable when you cut the signal, while sweeping the master filter frequency emphasises the noise around that band. The trigger system can be quite tricky to set-up, which comes down to sensitivity.

This means that when using heavily-compressed loops or long sustained notes, there's not enough variation in the sound to take advantage of this with the AM and FM modulation. Speaking of which, the AM dials are centred at 9 o'clock, which isn't so intuitive when dealing with positive and negative modulation.

The sound is naturally clean, but there's enough headroom in the input stage to overdrive it, and more still with the three volume sliders.

Overall, the Restyler lives up to its looks, and is a good choice for simple and advanced filtering work. It suits anyone who prefers to do things by hand, and isn't looking for MIDI control, BPM sync or interfacing with a modular system. It can take a bit more time to hone in on the sweet spot when using the AM and FM, but it doesn't disappoint when you get there.