I bought an SMR4 chipped Shruthi last year and not really sat down with it until now. I'm mid re-configure and plugged a Keystep into it and a set of headphones in an attempt to find if it really deserves deskspace.
The sounds I'm getting out of it are quite rich and wavetable-e. Very reminiscent of my Microwave XTk and so it should, really; they nicked a bunch of PPG waves heheh. But it's also very harsh. Very, very harsh. So very very, very harsh. Doesn't take much resonance to get the filter into self-oscillation (using this chip) and the shrillness can be compounded depending on the type of operator being used in the mixer section. That said, it does rival my µwaveII in terms of wavetable synthesis implementation and modulation flexibility.
As far as monosynths of any breed go, it does perform. High end and low end really come through nicely with the subosc moving the air in the room very smooth and cleanly. Running a fast arp then moving it up into the top-end, things don't break up, unless you want them to by using one of the more broken sounding waveforms or purposely over digital mixer options. Does a convincing devilfish 303 and a good MS-20 -> Boss Turbo Distortion (devilfish MS-20? lol).
I'm still exploring how the LFO's work (or FLO's, as mine has printed on it). The attack parameter is a nice touch and can augment the attacks of the two envelopes. They could go slower for my tastes, but eh, I'm sure I can work something out using the operators, or failing that there is a CV input or two that I can sort out for external lfo signals.
They could have done with a third envelope using 6 stages to go with the 'parameter' parameter, but I'm late to the party, no asking for stuff now, stiff cheese for me! The two envelopes it does have are very fast and snappy. Perfect for percussion when combined with the percussion oriented osc waves.
The 12 mod matrix is near as good as a 16 slot matrix, heheh. All the usual suspects are there for source and destination. Just one complaint: it's pretty dumb that Env2 has to be sent to the amp manually and is not hardwired as is Env1 is to the filter.
My next stunt will be to plug it's MIDI out into my Microgranny 2 and then the MG2's output back into the Shurthi. Should make a fitting little wonky machine out of the two of them.
Definitely I'm going to open it up and stick the CV wires onto it I think, but also look into a different filter chip. I not sure if I my old ears like the wailing filter as much as it did 20yrs ago!