Dubreq Stylophone

Martin West
November 19, 2008

Rating: 10/10

Brilliant, I remeber these from childrens T.V and Rolf Harris, excellent product a blast from the -past at a reasonable price

The company were 1st class to deal with.
I bought 4 and 0ne arrived faulty, dolphin were exceptional in their customer service and replaced almost by return of post, I would recomend dolphin and will buy again, Great christmas present for my nieces and nephews

Tim Wright
June 16, 2008

Rating: 5/10

Imagine my delight when my son gave me a new Stylophone for Fathers Day! :O)

Imagine my joy to learn it was a fully endorsed product by Dubreq!

Indeed, the added simplicity of only needing 3 x AA batteries instead of that 9V PP3, or whatever the designation was, is also a boon.

Then things went bad…

‘bzoaaaaaauuuuuuu... bzoauuuuuu.. bzooooooooo’.

“Oh no.. they surely haven’t?”.

Yes, sadly the have.

Gone is that lovely oscillator.

Say hello to slow PCM samples.

I nearly cried... :’O(

If the 3 x Sound Styles had been a real oscillator with some filters, or different waveforms I’d have been close to slapping musical monkeys.

This new Stylophone can't compete with 50p shop naff import keyboards with 300 built in awful samples, and yet that’s basically who they are up against now.

The beauty of the original was ‘that’ sound, and it’s not even inside this new box, even though they say it is... it’s just a single sample which as far as I can make out is placaed at the top of the keyboard, so anything lower is slower and therefore less crisp.

Let’s face it, the box and stylus is probably 10 x more expensive than any bit of electronics they’d chosen to put inside. They could have done so much with this but they haven’t. At the very least have a simple CPU generate the waveform for goodness sake.

I was of course still very grateful to my son, but sorely disappointed in Dubreq and company.

I've given it 5/10 just beacuse the box is a very good copy of the original, and they still have the pitch adjuster on the back which was always good fun, and kept the vibrato which can disguise the awful sample situation to a degree because at least that is real-time and not sampled.

gabhan
December 28, 2007

Rating: 8/10

Got it at last. Bought two, one for me and another as a xmas gift. A great wee device to add to any outfit. Rare sound. Got here on time (just) for christmas! But it got here all the same.
Cheers!