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I have the Mk-6 with the Protozoa rom, X-lead V2 rom, and the Proteus Pop Collection rom. I bought this in February 2004 and have owned it for a year. Right off the bat when I heard it I was impressed about 50/50. I was certainly happy when I expanded it with new roms because just one rom fits one genre too much. If you're into just pre-made presets this is probably not the board for you. The real magic is customizing your own presets. The sounds out of the box have a sound quality of about 7/10, but when you dig deep and create your own presets, the sounds become a 10.
Adjust the envelopes, turn the velocity amplification up to the max, set the LFO rate and amount to your liking, add some reverb and another effect of your choice, and choose one of the incredible Z-plane filters, and whallah! You have one of the best sounding sample-playback synth sounds on the planet. I would go as far as to say that when you spend 100's of hours with this keyboard, the emu sounds bury Korg and Roland, and are at par with Yamaha and Kurzweil. The drums are the best of all, the strings are realistic and beautiful, the guitars are first rate when you play with the controls and filters, the bases are booming, the classic keyboard sounds are awesome, the organs are simply phenomonal, the arpeggiator kicks ass, and even the pianos become acceptable with editing.
The only drawbacks are the global effects, the resonance knob doesn't work on held notes, some presets have notes that stick, but these are minor gripes compared to the tremondous sound quality, edit features, and incredible ease of use.
Emu is severely underated and unknown. That may be why they are out of the hardware synth industry. This synth looks like a toy out of the box and some presets sound like a toy, but with time well spent customizing, you will be blown away. A true buried and forgotton treasure. Shame on you music world for letting emu synths going under, shame on you.
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