Behringer CZ-1 Mini

La gamme mini est plutôt sympathique je trouve. Tarif au ras des pâquerettes, sons plutôt convaincants, finitions franchement pas mal. J'attendais le CZ1 mini depuis au moins 2 ans .. annoncé comme étant compatible sysex casio CZ, j'étais réellement impatient.. ayant eu , il y a fort longentemps un cz101. Alors , je vous le dit tout de suite, pour le moment ,firmware 1.02, cela ne fonctionne absolument pas ! Quelque soit le soft utilisé. Synthribe, virtual CZ, edisyn...Info relayée également sur le forum de Behringer.. pour le reste, ça sonne relativement proche du CZ si ce n'est, pas de ring ni noise modulator. Autre sujet de mécontentement, seulement 16 présets... même la série micro , tel que le jt4000 en compte 32. Espérons une mise à jour rapide et efficace pour solutionner tout cela. Ah et aussi juste 3 voix de paraphonie... Le plus , c'est le filtre 24 db analo qui peut grogner plutôt efficacement. bref , à l'heure où j'écris ce texte, je suis mitigé sur ce CZ1 mini. Misons sur l'avenir, tout comme le ProVs mini en son temps , pour avoir un upgrade de firmware améliorant tout ceci. Et là, ce sera la petite machine de phase distorion que j'attendais.

I was a big fan of the Casio CZs in the 80s. I had tried one out in a music store and loved its individuality and peculiarity. However, when I had saved up enough to buy one they had disappeared from the market. 😢

Fast Forward a few decades and I see, in a trade mag, that Behringer were planning to reintroduce a Phase Distortion Synth in its MINI series based on the CZs. I got all excited!

However, from the announcement to the availability of the device a few years passed! Then, when they finally released it, how could I refuse?

The CZ MINI is sturdily made with a lot of options for connecting it with other devices (Full size MIDI in; Sync jack, USB C and headphones jack). This is a major improvement on my first Behringer MINI Synth (JT 4000) which I never managed to connect to a keyboard and gave away to a kid as a toy.

My initial reaction was not that favourable. The presets it came with were largely bass patches and the others were nothing to write home about, compared with the pre-sets on a Casio CZ1. I was set for disappointment However, once I had watched an excellent YouTube video on how to program new patches on the CZ MINI, I started to have fun with the beast. Once you get the basic idea, it is not as difficult to program as others I have struggled with.

The one thing that would have made this little gem really merit 5 stars would have been more polyphony. The 3 note polyphony it came with limits its use, four should have been the minimum - you can't do 7th chords, for example, without that 4th note. Consequently, I only give the CZ MINI three stars for Features. However, I haven't checked for any updates to the software, as perhaps Behringer may have plans to upgrade that area.

I must admit that I was so disappointed at first that I bought the Arturia Software version of the CZ. That has all the polyphony you'd need and is super simple to program with some very useful pre-sets. But, of course, that means you have to have access to a computer, so I will keep my CZ MINI for those times when I am out of home (holidays coming up) and I can fiddle with the knobs and waveforms to my heart's content!