Maybe I’m displaying my bias for analog, but old digital synths just don’t do it for me. I love the hands-on of old analog synths, but not al the menus of old digital synths. Vintage digital doesn’t seem to have the usability or “feel” that old analog has.

Truth be told the synths with the obscure parts are often better as they just don’t sound quite like any of the others.

There are plenty of cool things you can do with samplers… pushing a sample to the nyquist frequency, for example, always yields interesting results I find. A lot of drum/drill & bass wouldn’t be possible without digital hardware either. Also, the things you can do with a synth like the FIZMO or the Wavestation A/D are just amazing– and not really possible with analog gear.

Don’t get me wrong, I love analog equipment (do I ever love it), but digital is pretty good too if you know how to use it

Emu’s are the same way; certain sounds when samples come out of those units much nicer, fuller, etc. than others. Akai has it’s own uniqueness to samples too.

It’s also nice that this stuff is fairly old that it’s inexpensive to not care about for road usage either, just buy a new unit if you fuck it up.

And who wants to load patches from floppy disks anymore?