Purchased At: E-Bay

Strengths: Analog filter effects! 35 DSP modeling effects which you can choose to make sounds like FM synthesis or even old warm Moog leads. 16(!) different types of Arpeggios. A ribbon controller! Assignable knob, and 4 other dedicated knobs! 284 voices, at least 100 of which are damn nice. Sampler! Actual useful beats! Menus are damn simple and easy to navigate. Extremely versatile synth for creating all styles of techno. The knobs send out MIDI data!

Weaknesses: Ribbon controller doesn't send out MIDI. :( The general MIDI sounds, such as Pianos and Organs and stuff like that sound like poo. But that's because this 'board is meant for synthesizer sounds. When you change a voice you have to reset all the DSP stuff you assigned, like if you used a bunch of effects piled on top of eachother, they go bye bye. The sequencer is almost useless. }< Display isn't backlit.

Review Summary: Yamaha decided to take all the cool things about synths and cram them into a affordable toy/mini-synthesizer. A lot of idiots dis this board, but that's because they are comparing it to synths which cost thousands of dollars. It completely demolishes any other synth in it's price range. And it gives the aformentioned thousand dollar monsters a run for their overpriced money. Because no one else has ever bothered to explain this, here's the capabilities of the DJX's sampling: You can have up to 12 different key assignable samples. Of which no sample can be longer than 3 seconds. And all samples must not cohesively go over six seconds of sampling time. Which means you can have two 3 second samples or like 12 half second samples, or whatever you can make of six seconds. The samples are at I what I believe to be like 22Khz. Thus the sampler is more of a novelty than horribly useful, but hey for the price this is still amazing. You have so much control over the beats it's almost rediculous. Using the Cut-Off and Resonance knobs you can totally change the way the voices sound. The DUAL button acts just like Roland's old X-Dual stuff. I bought this board originally just for it's MIDI functions, and I found I'd also bought a decent little synth/keyboard as well. For the price this bastard is just a mothership of musical delight. If your a kid buy this and rock out your local skating rink. If your a synth collector then don't think about it, just get one. I promise these things will come back in the future as a collector's item. Congrats Yamaha!

P.S. Do not buy a DJX II.