Allright... I think I have found the last member for my studio now, giving me what I wanted; 8 synths, and one drummachine, all hooked up to a Mackie ONYX 1640 with two Lexicon FX processors for Delay/Reverb/Modulation (MX300 and MX400).
It has taken some time (more than 25 years) to arrive at this setup, which I now HOPE is complete for starting my Ambient projects. This has been one hell of a ride with more than 150 hardware instruments going thru the studio (I really have lost count). I've tried both direct MIDI sequencing and also Harddisk recording, and I've had love/hate relationship with both methods of making music... switching back and forth between the two, I finally decided that the solution would be to do BOTH! ... so I have been carefully setting up my mixer and synths, so that I can both make a piece of music using direct MIDI sequencing, and/or harddisk recording, depending on my mood and the score in general... not having to decide between the two has helped a lot.
My synthesizers today is a mixture of both analog and digital, but has definitely shifted a lot more towards digital machines, simply because they are more flexible, and have more synthesis options... today I have only one type of instrument where I will not let go of analog, and that's Bass sounds... and in a very few situations, when pitch needs to be very high and crystal clear without aliasing.
I use all my synths in single mode... simply because that gives most flexibility in sound design, at FX is usually compromised as soon as you enter multimode of almost all synthesizers, and also, I want the individual analog EQ and FX send on my mixer to be on a "per part" basis. I have only one machine that work standalone, and that is the drummachine. So basically, my setup is an 8 track plus a drummachine/FX track that work completely stand alone (incl. DSP effects).
The synths I ended up with are:
Waldorf - Blofeld Keyboard
DSI - Prophet 12
Roland - V-Synth XT
Yamaha - FS1R
E-MU - Proteus 2000 (with XL-1, World Expedition, Virtuoso 1+2 ROMs)
Waldorf - Microwave II
Waldorf - Pulse 2
Evolution Synthesis - EVS-1
Waldorf - Rack Attack
The new member in the studio is the Evolution Synthesis - EVS-1 synthesizer, which I got rather cheap. It is a strange hybrid digital beast from about 1990, featuring a mix of FM, Phase Modulation, Formant, Subtractive Synthesis, Waveshaping and other "modules" of synthesis, set up in algorithms like on an FM synth... it has a really special sound that is both analogue'ish and brutally digital... it is based on a custom digital synth DSP chip I did not know about, but found the datasheet for, and is 16 voice polyphonic... can be really dirty and gritty with aliasing in the higher notes like a digital oscillator of the Evolver. It also has full SysEx specs for creating an editor for it.
Here are three links to some youtube videos of it in action:
https://youtu.be/r9xIg63UtfMhttps://youtu.be/8ZfB9iG0Qt0https://youtu.be/JKeigA4P8Y4