For those of you that care about this kind of thing, here are a few still photos of Hapax, taken with my exceedingly average phone camera, along with some of my initial thoughts.
Unopened box
It’s a cardboard box. What else can I say?
Opened box
There was a protective cardboard structure over the knobs, which I removed for this photo. Note that 2 of the encoder knobs had actually come off during shipping, but I fished them out of the bottom of the box and re-attached them to the encoder shafts without issue.
What’s in the box
- Hapax
- English quickstart manual
- A quick reference card
- A few stickers
- A TRS MIDI adapter (I didn’t check if it was A or B)
- A 15V DC power supply with US / EU / UK / AUS plug ends (I’ve attached the US one here)
Back panel
I hadn’t found particularly good non-glamour-shot photos of the back panel, so here you go:
SD card
The SD card is completely nondescript, with no label. Should be 2GB, but I haven’t verified it yet.
Screens
Both screens are easy to see and crystal clear. Note that in these photos, the screens look more blue than they actually are. In actuality, I find the screens to be fairly neutral, if slightly cool, shades of grey. Also, there’s a little bit of banding in the photos which is totally not there in person.
Buttons
Squarp definitely put a lot of care and effort into the feel of the buttons.
The side buttons (black or color background with white text) have a very positive tactile “click” feeling when pressed. It’s nice. They’re definitely some kind of rubber and not hard plastic.
The center grid buttons seem to made out of the same material as the side buttons, but don’t “click” in the same way that the side buttons do. I haven’t actually tried this thing out yet, but I have a hunch this is a good thing. These buttons feel like I’d expect them to.
Lights
The lights are nice and bright in normal room light. There’s no way a non-HDR photo can do the button lights justice. They look fantastic, in my opinion. I don’t know how visible they’d be in direct sunlight, but they’re significantly brighter than Hermod’s buttons, that’s for sure.
(FWIW, this is what is displayed when you go to Settings > Misc > Palette)
In the next two photos, I have the room lights off, but there’s a little afternoon winter light coming in the window. This is about how bright it is in my studio when I’m streaming, which is to say, not very.
Here, I’ve adjusted the ISO and shutter speed adjusted to capture the chassis and OLED screens roughly as they appear to me. Ignore the overexposed center grid buttons for now.
In this photo, I’ve adjusted the ISO and shutter speed to capture the center grid buttons as they appear to me, which is to say quite bright and extremely colorful. Imagine both this and the previous photo merged together, and that’s what Hapax looks like in low light. If only I still had my DSLR.
Encoders
The encoders feel extremely sturdy, and have a very satisfying and stiff rotation feel and a good click when pushed. I don’t anticipate a lot of accidental knob turns while pressing them, and I will have to get used to the stiffer feel. The knob shape is thoughtful, with an indentation on the top and a scalloped circumference.
Here’s a photo with one of the knobs removed, revealing the D-shape encoder shaft.
And here’s what the knob looks like underneath. While the knobs fit the encoder shafts perfectly, and everything feels solid, there’s definitely a part of me that wishes the knobs felt a little heftier. That said, I really like their shape.
But how does it play?
I have no idea. I literally just unboxed it. Head over to my Twitch channel and follow me, because I’ll be using this as soon as I’ve figured it out (and have rewired everything in my studio to accommodate it).
