Ok the sounds, very good strings brasses and pads aswell as some good basses, organs, electric piano's and acoustic guitars. Synth choirs and voxes are very good 2. Drums are nice aswell as the percussion. The wood percussion sounds very good. THe strength are the waveforms and envelopes and modulation options. Nice feature is the patch select button. Nice to change the sound in that way.

The effects are nice too. Lots of reverbs and choruses. I also like the rotary speaker simulation in it. Good for the organs.

Usage of it is very simple. Editing is not as difficult as it seems at first sight. Just remember what you are doing and you should be able to create very nice sounds. Just staple the waveforms, add filters and envelopes to them. Route modulation sources and add a nice effect and here you go. I love this machine. If you have the chance to buy it, you really should. You'll love it ! (just make sure everything works fine, no callibration errors, good softwareupdate and no broken buttons. mine are fine but I readed that others have buttons that are quickly damaged...)

"You can easily find yourself doing recreations of analog sounds, which always is a great feature on digital instruments like this one given the fact the VFX-synths can be had for peanuts whereas analogues cost about as much as used cars in better-than-lemon status." - BUT - where the VFX really shine is when making digital sounds reminiscent of the mighty PPGs and so on.

Further info about the sounds - they are compatible with the original VFX, the VFX SD, the VFX SDII and the SD1. Essentially the same synthesizer but with some differences here and there.

The sound programming is very flexible. It doesn't have a resonant filter, which can be a letdown, but you can use various modulation methods for the oscillators which compensate a lot - and, better up, giving you possibilities not found on many other synths. The filters are quite interesting being a 2 filter in series solution - for each oscillator you use. Low and high pass are provided. I really like that high pass filter.

You can easily find yourself doing recreations of analog sounds, which always is a great feature on digital instruments like this one given the fact the VFX-synths can be had for peanuts whereas analogues cost about as much as used cars in better-than-lemon status.

I paid about $380 for mine (in a store) and it was in a rather good shape and came with a pair of new headphones & a new sustain pedal. My main intention was to use it out on the countryside when away from the home studio, but I quickly decided to bring the synth with me back home, since it's really an amazing piece to work with.

I had some initial system errors after having done this, done that, clicked here, there and... well, clicking around like mad to tell you the truth. That was solved when I got back here - turns out the synth is very sensitive for bad line conditions.

As I said, I will be working on the sounds, and for those of you who don't know, I'm a dude who makes sounds for a bunch of synths - sounds which I provide for a small fee (and sometimes free) on my webpage - http://hem.passagen.se/sequence - "Synthesite" being the site's name (I actually came up with that name in 1994 before hearing about Synth Site and I've sticked with it since that - sorry if it seems lame). I guess the sounds will be ready in about two weeks. Make sure to check my site for info updates if you're interested in getting a new sound set. I can provide it on floppy or as sysex data over e-mail.

Now, to adjust the overall marks of these things, I give it a five, and I would have anyway, since the price was so low & the power so high.

Finally, no - I don't agree in that it would be "plastic". It's a weighty instrument made of solid steel logic, it's just plastic on the ends - which is good actually so you won't scratch your hands as you probably would on an all-metal instrument.