I got mine about a week ago and I’m really loving it.
OK, there are some things that aren’t my favorite. The XY pad is cool but I think a hard surface would work better. It’s really heavy–about 45 lbs. I have no plans playing live with it but even getting to the back to patch cables requires effort. The much-discussed fans aren’t bad in low mode but it’s not summer yet so we’ll see…Otherwise the thing is built really well with hardware as solid as you’d expect.
The sounds are gorgeous. I guess I didn’t realize when it came out that it had a SVF on it, which was one of the deal sealers. And there are so many little things that make for such rich sounds. For example each voice can have variances of a number of cents you can control for those per-voice differences that you get in all-analog synths. And the SVF is actually 2 filters in series for which you can space the cutoff for phasey-type sounds. I would have thought that a ladder filter would be too muddy for a poly but it works really well especially with the various pole settings. Being able to combine the filters is almost like build-your-own-filter functionality! I’m really liking the various FM and ring mod tones. Blending them subtly can really enrich a patch. There’s even control over the noise limiting so you can go full-hiss if you want!
Each of the modules seems to give you almost all of the options you’d want, for example the envelopes let you loop, add hold time, adjust overall timing, change between linear and exponential per stage, etc. Any time I think a feature isn’t there I can almost always find another way of doing it. The layout and combination of hardware and soft knobs makes sense; the most-used stuff is on the panel with everything else just a click away.
Overall, I’m super happy to have this thing. I liked the Rev2 for lots of things but wasn’t always able to get meaty tones and this does that so well in addition to just about everything I liked on the Rev2. It’s super pricey but apparently the Minimoog would be around $60K in 2020 dollars so you do the math!