The only downside is that being made by novation its tends to all go wrong after a while, mine has been back to the factory once, its would freek out at free will and a ring modulated type noise would engulf all the drum sounds (I also know of 2 friends who have had the same problem), also its sometimes decides it only wants to play 1 ASM sound at one time e.g. kick, snare, toms (gotta love it) my new one has not decided to go mad on me yet but give it time, (I own a basstation and thats had it as well) dont now what the reliability is like on the super nova but have have been warned about the drumstation, by all means by one but just dont put a hammer through it when it goes wrong!

Final Opinion: More portable, sounds good enough. 5/5

808: Bass drum is a little thicker sounding but the bass station emulates about %90 accurately, seems just a little drier than the real 808 Most of the other 808 sounds are dead on, some not as immediate as the real 808 but all are almost prefect it's so close you'd be hard pressed to hear the difference, which is really small. Also the drumstation adds tuning to certain sounds that didn't have tuning on the real 808, for example you can tune the cowbell for some whacked out dub sounds.

909: Even closer to the real thing, since the actual 909 used samples for the hats, cymbals, claps etc. only the bass drum/snare/toms were actually analog. Again the real 909 has a thicker sounding bass drum, but the drumstation seems to emulate the 909 bd almost flawlessly better than the 808 bd emulation IMO. You'll lose a little low-end thump but its so minor you probably won't know which is being used, I progammes the same line on my sequencer and my friends 909 for reference started them up in sync and muted them indepedently for a/bing purposes and the drumstation really does sound exactly like a 909 -- it's uncanny and pretty amazing.

In conclusion: I prefer to use the 808 sounds of my real 808, but the drumstation hits the 808 sounds about 90% accurately which is really good considering it's small size, the 909 sounds are so good you be hard pressed to tell them apart from the real thing. All in all a killer rack and definitely anyone making electronic type music with a need for a hard beat this will suit your needs and best of all for 1/4 the price of buying real 808\909's.. I paid about $800 for my 808 and I've seen 909's fetching $1000-1200 on ebay, you can get everything sans the sequencer in a drum station for lesss than $500, you make the call. Not to mention it's all digital and probably won't ever need the regular servicing of am older analog drum machine..

Get one.. 5 marks!

-nubey