Behringer Neutron: A Reliable Semi Modular Synthesizer

Behringer have packed a lot of features in a relatively compact and affordable package – and with a better build quality than one might expect.

The dual oscillators are flexible and provide plenty of control for shaping sounds. The onboard effects are also surprisingly useful and allow the synthesizer to serve as a self-contained instrument as well as a singular module amongst others. Once the default routing is understood, it is easy to come up with simple to reasonably interesting patches that sound good and play well before even engaging with the patch bay.

Having said this, the biggest limitations as I see it are:

At least as far as I can tell, there is no way to use the 2 envelopes to modulate anything other than the VCA and filter cutoff respectively. It would have been very welcome to be able to access the envelope CV on the patch bay.

Furthermore, if you want to trigger the synthesizer from an external CV device (rather than MIDI), you have to use up your mult to duplicate your incoming gate signal to trigger ENV 1 and 2. It would have been preferable to have ENV 2 CV normalised to the input of ENV 1 to avoid this limitation.

Some of the features are hidden behind complicated button presses that require the manual to discover and utilise (the manual also contains some minor misprints). This is somewhat offset by the very good control application that Behringer provides, however it would be preferable to not have to rely on software to have easy control of the instrument’s more advanced features.

All in all, I think it is a decent enough instrument, certainly for its price. In terms of value it is hard to beat what you are getting. The question then becomes whether it is a suitable fit for what you are currently looking for and how you plan to integrate it into an existing system.