The MRS-2 Promars Compuphonic appeared shortly after the Jupiter-4 (1978), whose architecture it was modelled on. It is one of the few VCO (voltage-controlled oscillator) synthesisers with storable sounds.
Gary Numan, Klaus Schulze, Howard Jones, OMD, Heaven 17 and Depeche Mode used it live and in studio recordings.
The MRS-2 is based on two VCOs, while the Jupiter-4 still has to make do with one oscillator per voice. The pitch range and waveform of the first VCO can be edited. The second oscillator simply takes over. Noise can be switched on directly behind the VCO section. The Promars has been equipped with two filters: a high-pass filter that only affects the frequencies between 40 Hz and 5 kHz and a fully editable 12 dB low-pass filter from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. The low-pass filter can be modulated with LFO and ADSR envelopes. A further ADSR envelope controls the VCA. The attack can be used to shape percussive sounds and pad sounds. The sound is modulated via the LFO with four waveforms, LFO delay and LFO bend.
The name Compuphonic refers to the fact that the sounds are backed up by a digital 8-bit Intel 8080 microprocessor. The RAM memory size of 128 bytes is only sufficient to archive 8 fixed presets and 8 custom sounds. (Source: amazona)
