Quarks by After Later Audio is a digital synthvoice with modal synthesis and is based on the Mutable Instruments Elements module. Modal synthesis is a variant of the better-known physical modelling synthesis and is also capable of simulating the physical behaviour of stringed instruments, but also wood, glass or metal. Besides variants of stringed and plucked instruments, percussive sounds and novel sounds are no problem for this sound generation. PM synthesis has basically been around since 1971, only it was only made tangible in synthesizers like Korg Prophecy and Yamaha VL1 in the 90s. Both synthesizers sounded great even back then, but the operation was mostly menu typing. Not so with Quarks, because all relevant parameters have their own knob. In addition, 10 of the 17 parameters can be modulated via control voltage. By the way, Quark's is a full 12 HP smaller than Elements with exactly the same specifications.