The Technos Acxel is a resynthesizer, launched by the Quebec-based company Technos in 1987. It was the first dedicated resynthesizer machine, and was also capable of additive synthesis. The Acxel was invented by Pierre Guilmette, the operational design was a Nil Parent realization, and the system was developed at Technos, a company owned and directed by Pierre Guilmette, Nil Parent and other partners. Operation The Technos Acxel may look similar in operation to a sampler, although its workings were very different and the sound structure is accessible. Where samplers used an A/D converter to convert a continuously-variable analogue signal into digital data, the Axcel worked on the premise that any sound, no matter how harmonically complex, could be broken down into a finite number of sine waves, and that these sine waves could be individually altered to fundamentally change the sound, producing what Technos founder Nil Parent termed re-synthèse. A project for an "Acxel II" was started in 2008 by a Quebec based company, Idarca-Audio Inc. The Acxel II was designed by Pierre Guilmette, and was an evolution of the original Acxel, with many new features, in particular additional signal processing and higher overall performance. Idarca-Audio was bankrupted in 2010, before they could ship any units, due to lack of funding. Utilising a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analysis, sounds inputted into the Acxel were broken down into a number of variable-amplitude and variable-frequency sine waves, up to a maximum of 1024. Once sounds had been processed by the Acxel, all the constituent waves could be pitched up or down by the same factor, which had the effect of increasing the pitch of the sound without affecting length, or introducing any of the digital artefacts that traditional samplers did (for example, pitching all waves up by a factor of 2 would raise the overall pitch of the sound by 1 octave, without affecting length. Using a traditional sampler, pitching a sound up by 1 octave would result in it being halved in length). The Acxel also had the capability to synthesise sounds from scratch. The same 1024 sine oscillators, that in fact can be of various waveforms including of draw-able shape, which were used to resynthesize sounds could also be used for additive synthesis. You can either take Analyzed sounds and modify them. A large palette of parameters and controls is accessible, on the same manner if you start from scratch