Yes, the cirklon OS has been fine-honed over many loving years of attention by Colin its creator. There are a few areas where I think it still has an edge over the Hapax - for example, 100+ (!) lanes in a single drum track (cf. 8 on Hapax), fantastic inter-track options (such as stealing or pushing notes from one track to another) and deep ‘aux events’ which allow you to create your own very intricate midi effects. The actual hardware is in a class of its own too - while the Hapax knobs / pads feel fine to the touch, the cirklon keys / knobs feel very premium. For me one of the down-sides of the cirklon is a rather lacklustre song mode - similar to the oxi one, it seems better suited to flicking through patterns in real time rather than constructing song arrangements. In terms of most other things, I’m finding the Hapax much more immediate and fun - arps / chords / songs / midi effects etc etc don’t exist on the cirklon - which is an important factor at the end of the day (literally, at the end of the day when my brain just wants to play music rather than program a sequencer) 
… The recent introduction of instrument defs on the Hapax has now made it my sequencer of choice.
yeah, the inter-track thing is interesting , but I think can be pretty confusing for many… but for powerful.
(we kind of have it a bit with transpose tracks - but indeed this is pretty limited)
instrument defs are the future
you only need to think a little bit around midi 2.0 / midi-ci to realise, theres a huge amount of potential here…
hapax could :
- pickup definitions from midi-ci enabled devices
- publish midi-ci based off instrument defs
similarly hapax is well placed to expand not the mpe territory…
some of this will take time, as obviously important to hit ‘mainstream feature requests’ first…and midi 2.0/midi ci really will only be beneficial once we see more adoption and rollout - though that timeline could suit hapax development timeline too!
so its a bit down the road… but very exciting… one day not having to care about CC numbers 
I’ve heard of quite a few people who have previously coveted the Cirklon recently move to coveting the Hapax instead. Personally for me, Pyramid killed my Cirklon lust, but using Hapax definitely seems a lot less ‘homework’ than Cirklon.
One thing I was thinking about for instrument defs, I was thinking about asking Squarp if it was possible to reorder the definited CCs to your own order. Because the default assignments are absolute nonsense: Filter cutoff at 74, and resonance at 71? And in between those two: Amp decay (72) and then Amp attack (73)???
Here’s a possibly unrelated photo of Dave Smith getting absolutely hammered on tequila.
You’ll find in the exemples we provided, the CCs are not sorted. You absolutely can write the following:
[CC]
74 filter frequency
63 filter drive
71 filter resonance
[/CC]
They’ll appear in this order in the INSTR DEF category. (Please note NRPNs will appear after the CCs)
I had no idea it re-ordered them (or even the examples were in a different order)
You guys are the best.
Did Squarp confirm Hapax will be midi 2.0 capable?
Yes, this re-ordering function is great! I discovered it by accident
I find this topic super interesting. Any updates from users with both?
I hd a Cirklon and made a track on that, but honestly it is not that great for polyphonic sounds like chords…etc. It is best as a drum or mono sequencer, imo. The build quality is the best and the MIDI timing is elite. That said, I don’t have a ton of hardware synths. I want to sequence a few polysynths and some semi modular monos and maybe add in a drum machine if I want some extra sounds. The rest of the music I make on samplers.
I love the Oxis chord mode a lot and the way i can harmonize other tracks with it so I may lean in that direction. Also the portability appeals. It’s a tough call, Squarp is real good and the pyramid is pretty great. I just didn’t really click with the Squarp MIDI FX as much as I thought I would. Ended up using ableton ones a lot. That honestly may just be due to the interface, as having a grid mode is much more appealing to me.
That’s interesting what you say about the Cirklon, I did kind of suspect that. Definitely seemed to me to be more of a ‘programmers’ sequencer rather than a ‘players’ one. I’m not nearly as good a player as I would like to be, but like that both the Hapax and the Pyramid allow you to do a hybrid mode of that. Even the Pyramid with its small screen and single row was better than nothing.
Is the timing on the Cirklon noticeably better? I know people have raved for years about the timing of Akai sequencers, but always thought that was more related to older gear or using a computer to sequence. I have never noticed any timing issues using Pyramid or Hapax as standalone sequencers as the master clock.
The timing on the Cirklon is world class, but honestly with an ERM sync clock, I am pretty sure that the Hapax is quite good to. I don’t remember the Pyramid having any issues there either, I just did not click with the Pyramid long enough to really find out.
The new Akai sequencers have terrible timing, imo. They don’t slave well at all. The MPC4000 was the best timing I ever have seen, right up there with the Cirklon. It was a massive disappointment to go to the MPC One after. I basically had to go DAWless and do everything in the One, but then recording into the DAW became a huge pain, and thats something I really want to do with any hardware. So I just sold it and moved on.
I just sync my MPC to the Pyramid/Hapax clock and sequence everything in the MPC directly from it. each Track gets a separate MIDI channel, corresponding to the Pyramid/Hapax track. Samples on one track (x 8 banks of 16 pads per track, basically limitless sampling); drum programs on second track; multisamples, which you can now assign to different zones on a single keyboard range on third track, and plugins on tracks four to eight, depending.
As someone with both I have little to update here, because I’ve been mostly using the other one -_-
I think I still prefer the Hapax and it still feels leagues more capable, but I’ve been feeling more creative outside of the music corner. Im starting to think OXI might be the summer sequencer while Hapax is the fall/winter one :).
It’s a bummer there’s no internal battery. I’m positive if it had one I’d be using the Squarp and getting more depth into my tracks. Needing some sort of external power thing to make it work kinda sucks at this price. Thankfully the OXI has a cool chord mode too, and the arp and harmony stuff is solid enough that I don’t feel like I’m missing out on too much either. I’m not building songs on either, just parts into a groovebox or daw.
I sold my oxi recently. Ultimately, while i appreciate it, i can only fit a limited number of sequencers…
I much prefer the hapax. obviously one can find features on the oxi that don’t exist on the hapax, and ultimately if those are important to you, those affect any comparison.
I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to sequencers, and somehow the oxi seems kind of redundant overall (while it does have some unique stuff). I love the torso t-1 for generative stuff. I love the attention to detail on the hapax, and there is certainly some great stuff in here. (lol - i can measure how good the features are by the degree to which they generate additional requests). Like the transposition track itself can have fx in it.haven’t tried it yet, but you could send cc from one of the main tracks to the matrix in the fx on the trsp track. none of my other sequencers have anything at all like the elasticity feature.
for pure detail in step by step timing and direction resolution - look at the schrittmacher…and then there is the nemo. All of these seem essential to me. The oxi doesn’t. But this is so subjective…
The Oxi One new cooking firmware seems awesome!
I wish Squarp would take some inspiration from some features for the future
yes.
I miss Autoclock on the Hapax a lot… going into the menu and change clock sources back and forth is really annoying. They had it already in the pyramid.
OXI has another great feature… it can offset timing (latency) per sequencer positive and negative
I have both, the different featuresets are different enough to justify it as far as I’m concerned.
Oxi is great for generative sessions which I love, portability is great and I use the Bluetooth quite a bit, their Discord is very active and there are a couple of features and bugfixes in the release notes they’ve implemented based on my feedback. Looking forward to seeing where it will be in 6-12 months.
Hapax is a much more mature and feature rich, more professional solid product I feel. I’d probably go with Hapax if I had to choose but I love both.
Ooh, nice.
About offset per track: I did request this feature and they told me it is on Squarp’s roadmap too
Now at January 2024:
I work a lot with my OXI ONE and it’s a great sequencer. The biggest problem is, it doesn’t do any tuplets.
The new HAPAX firmware 2.0 seems very nice. Probably I will switch soon. Besides tuplets I also like the 16 tracks which can now hold 16 patterns. I will use it together with my FH-2 and my Eurorack system.
Dave had excellent taste…Casamigos!