What is the ISO-F1?
NANO Performance has spent years making Eurorack modules in Barcelona, most notably the ONA oscillator built around the classic CEM3340 chip. The ISO-F1 is the first thing the company has made that does not live in a modular case. It is a standalone analogue tone box, a three-band isolator and a separate filter in one CNC-milled aluminium housing, designed to sit in front of a DJ.
The whole thing is built to be grabbed in the dark. The knobs are milled aluminium, each ringed with LEDs so you can read positions in a black room, and a magnetic stand lets the unit perch on top of a mixer instead of taking up a channel.
Why would a house DJ want an isolator?
Isolators have always had a cult around them. A three-band isolator lets you fully kill or push the lows, mids and highs as separate blocks, which is a different feel from a normal EQ. It is how you drop the bottom out of a record for a breakdown, swap basslines cleanly between two tracks, or carve a track down to a hi-hat and bring it back. Deep, disco and house DJs who came up on rotary mixers treat that kind of frequency control as part of the performance, not a utility.
The catch has always been access. Isolation that good usually means buying a rotary or isolator mixer. The ISO-F1 unbundles it: one box you can drop into any setup, club CDJs included.
An isolator is a feel thing, and putting one in front of a standard club mixer is the whole point.
What does it actually do, control by control?
The isolator splits into low, mid and high, and the crossover points move. You can set the low-to-mid split at 100, 200 or 400 Hz and the mid-to-high split at 1.5, 2 or 3 kHz, so the bands line up with the record rather than a fixed factory curve. Gain is switchable at +6, +9 or +12 dB. A SHIFT button reaches secondary functions including instant band kills, and the isolator and filter each have their own bypass, so you can run one, the other or both. The analogue filter sits alongside for sweeps and build-ups.
What does it cost and when can you get it?
The ISO-F1 is 649 euros, 629 dollars or 569 pounds, up for pre-order at Thomann with shipping listed for the coming months. That is real money, but it undercuts the price of a full isolator mixer, which is the point.
