Impact Soundworks Super Audio Cart review

Retro gaming heaven

  • £119

MusicRadar Verdict

A brilliantly realised labour of love that would get top marks if it were 30 quid cheaper.

Pros

  • +

    Beautiful interface. Loads of sounds.

Cons

  • -

    Pricey.

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This lovingly designed Kontakt Player instrument gives you access to 600 multisampled tones (3.6GB) from seven of history's greatest games consoles - Nintendo's NES, SNES and Gameboy, Sega's Master System and Mega Drive, the Atari 2600 - and the Commodore 64 home computer.

The gorgeous, intuitive scripted interface runs up to four independent layers at a time, each with its own arpeggiator/sequencer and effects rack (plus a global rack on top), and includes a comprehensive mod matrix and an X/Y pad for both modulation and layer mixing.

From funky Sega instrumentalism and bouncy Nintendo oscillations to the fabulously primitive noises of the 2600 and characterful waves of the C64, Super Audio Cart is a vast toybox of stackable synth sounds, faux instruments, drum kits (lots of drum kits!) and FX, all easily adapted to modern contexts thanks to the deep onboard processing.

And the icing on the cake is the library of over 1000 Snapshots (presets) and Raw mode, which loads the samples as-recorded, for truly authentic chiptunery.

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