From what I understand you'd like to know more about the Sylphyo's unique features and you found our communication lacking in this regard. I hope this post will help you understand the product better, and we will try to communicate better on our product in the future.
First of all, the Sylphyo and the EWI take quite different stances at what makes a good electronic wind instrument. This should not be surprising, as in the acoustic world there are many very different and equally successful designs for a wind instrument too.
What sets the Sylphyo apart from the EWI is that it is designed to fit a wider range of playing styles, notably those of non-reed woodwinds players (more on that later), and to provide greater and more intimate control over electronic sounds.
Several features of the instrument contribute to its design intent. First, as air flows all the way through the instrument, the sensation while playing is much more "acoustic-like", and it allows a greater range of breath control techniques, while retaining the possibility to feel "closed" like an EWI. Then, there are techniques like "key-bend" and "shake vibrato" that are borrowed from some types of flutes. And as an extension of that, the Sylphyo also reacts to gestures on its back surface (the slider) and in the air (elevation, roll, compass control) thanks to its lighter weight. With time and practice it allows you to get much more timbral variations out of your sounds. This is what the Sylphyo aims at: intimate, physical, instrument-like control of your electronic sounds. As they're relatively novel, such features might look like "gadget gimmicks" if you don't think about the instrument as a whole, but videos like the Chat with Pedro series will show you how far you can go with it in a professional setting (of course we'd like to have more videos like this, but the product is still very young and not widespread).
As for the latency issue that popped up recently, this is very likely an individual issue having to do with the specific setup within which the Sylphyo is used. The Sylphyo itself is demonstrably one of the lowest latency controllers out there, even with the wireless option.
The Sylphyo was a wireless MIDI wind controller until around September 2018, where we made two important changes:
- We added an internal sound engine inside the Sylphyo itself.
- We changed the wireless receiver to make it a wireless audio/MIDI receiver.
So what do the internal sounds sound like? There's a pretty long overview of the seven first sounds, and the user guide has an up-to-date description of each sound, along with an accompanying video.
As you have seen, the internal sounds do not aim for realistic reproduction of acoustic sounds. This is for several reasons. First, it is extremely difficult to reproduce the sonic behavior of an acoustic instrument, and it's very computationally intensive, so much so that it'd be really costly to integrate into a mobile battery-powered instrument (and the battery wouldn't last long). We're planning to provide sounds with much acoustically-inspired behavior, but we're not aiming at reproducing some specific acoustic instrument. And the more important reason why we don't do that is that we feel the real power of the Sylphyo lies on the way you can control electronic sounds with it, so it'd be a waste to sacrifice all that control for realism. Acoustic-style rich behavior, that's a better thing to aim at in our opinion.
We're planning to gradually add more sounds and we're currently working on an editor that allows anyone to make presets with the elements of the sound engine we've developed.
Maybe you'll come to the conclusion that there's nothing appealing to you with the Sylphyo. No big deal. People have different needs and it would be a bad idea to try to fulfill them all with a single product! If you just want a more recent version of your EWI and nothing else, then it's likely the Sylphyo will not suit you and that's OK! But if you're looking for something different, the Sylphyo is definitely an instrument to consider.
You'll find some technical details in the user guide, but the best place to get answers is to ask us or our community, either here, in the Sylphyo Exchange Facebook group, or privately (contact@aodyo.com).