Exay One have entered the Eurorack fray with a remarkable‑looking scanner and panner. Astrax is full of futuristic vibes, and projects its sci‑fi‑inspired design in dramatic front‑panel cuts that give you a view into the guts of the machine. The layout is spacious, splitting the module nicely in two, locating the patch sockets tidily at the bottom and offering up some confidently sized controls. It gives a great first impression. That said, the module description, in a rather dull font, sitting in a box on the front, feels really out of place.

Scan

On the left, you have Scanning and on the right you have Panning, which doesn’t entirely explain what’s going on but it’s a good place to start. The Scanning side gives you four inputs and a single output. As you turn the knob, the inputs are routed, in turn, from 1 to 4, to the output. Between each pair, we have some smooth interpolation to carefully blend two inputs as you scan between them, so you get a mix of 1 and 2, 2 and 3, and then 3 and 4. Stick in four different waveforms from an oscillator, and you can blend between them. Add some modulation in the CV input and you have a constantly varying waveform at the output. The Scan knob stops at 1 and 4 and doesn’t cycle around like some similar scanner modules can. There are four LEDs peeking through the front panel window that follow the input scanning and also visualise the movement of one to another. I confess I expected the LEDs to be more dramatic, considering the design of the front panel and the gash through which you view them, but they are very gentle and reserved.

There are plenty of other uses for the scanning, especially if you plug a voltage sequence into the CV input. You could mix through modulations, leap between trigger patterns or remix four channels of audio, to name a few, and it will take CV or audio.

Pan

The Panning side has the opposite configuration, with a single input routed to four outputs. As you turn the knob, the source is sent to each output in turn, mixing from one to the other. The website suggests that this is quadrophonic panning, which it is in that I can send a signal to four different speakers, but it isn’t because I can only move from one speaker to the next in a straight line and not place it in space using a mix of all four speakers. It could be useful for moving a sound on a defined path, but as output 4 doesn’t mix into output 1 it couldn’t do a continuous loop; it can only go there and back again.

However, there are plenty of other things you can do with a single source and multiple destinations. You could route through different filters, or different effects modules, you could send triggers to different destinations or use it to route modulations through different parts of your rack.

Astrax offers a wide range of modulation and mixing possibilities. It’s the sort of module that grabs your attention and gives you ideas.

Going in either direction, Astrax offers a wide range of modulation and mixing possibilities. It’s the sort of module that grabs your attention and gives you ideas. It’s comfortable to use, moves and mixes smoothly, and its striking physicality means you won’t lose track of it amongst the chaos of your modular. It could have had a more dramatic lighting system though.