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I bought an HT-700 at a secondhand shop recently for $100 Canadian (approx. 70 US dollars. Brand new condition... it even had the original Casio batteries in it. Man, I love this thing, it is sooooo cool! After playing with it in the shop for about 15 minutes, I saw the depth of this thing and knew that I had to have it. 32 different waveforms including the classic sawtooth, square, pulse, noise, and lots of squeaky-clean digital waves. There is a LOT of editing power hidden away under the hood of this thing. The waveforms can be filtered with a REAL VCF, which has its own traditional ADSR envelope generator, filter cutoff and filter depth parameters, and real filter resonance. There is a separate ADSR envelope generator for the DCA. Modulation of the oscillators is courtesy of a single LFO with these waveforms: sine, saw up, saw down, square, and random! All in all you've got a very versatile, yet simple-to-program, 8-note polyphonic synth. Memory is kinda JX3P style: 20 presets, 20 programmable slots, and this is just for the synth section. It also has the typical 80's Casio 3-part auto accompaniment section but there's more than meets the eye: ten more internal (as opposed to the preset patterns) are FULLY programmable. Yup, you can write a percussion part, a bass part and a chord part (2 measures) and store them in memory. You can even edit the chord sound right down to waveform and all the other synth parameters. Cool. Most of the preset sounds are pretty useless, but man o man start programming and this thing can sound amazing. You can also make it sound really cheesy if you want, which I do. Retro video game noises? No problem. Kraftwerk beeps, boops and buzzes? I've got em now. This is stuff that my Trinity, Prophecy etc etc etc just won't do, at least not this easily. Bottom line: I have not read many good reviews about this thing but I love mine and I'm going back to play with it right now because it's TOO COOL!!!
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