Given its name, a sequel to Korg’s NTS-1 build-it-yourself synth isn’t a complete surprise, but the NTS-2’s design – along with the fact that it ships with a complementary book – does come a little out of leftfield. This is chiefly because the centrepiece of the hardware isn’t a synth engine but a 4-channel oscilloscope. This offers dual stereo inputs, which enable you to study, compare and overlap up to four signals at once. There are multiple colour display modes, and an interface that can be navigated with menu buttons and a clickable encoder.
There’s also an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) mode with a real-time spectrum analyser, along with a dual waveform generator. Each of the two oscillators can create sine, square, triangle, sawtooth, pulse and noise waveforms. As well as being used as audio, these sounds can also be employed as control voltage sources and set to cycle continuously or operate as one-shot impulses. This means that you can turn them into LFOs, envelopes, triggers, and control voltage generators, making the NTS-2 a potentially useful partner for any patchable synth. The NTS-2’s feature set is topped off by a tuner that offers multiple display modes. The end result is what Korg is calling a studio Swiss Army Knife for musicians.