Akai VX 600

How is it? Specs look dope. Aphex Twin recommended it, said he used it on the Tuss.

12 VCOs, 6 part multitimbrality, high pass filter, 2 lfos, 3 envs, etc. Any owners here?

Nah but Those Akai analogues sound real good. I nearly bought an AX80 couple of years ago but prices are going up crazy again.

Yeah, I have never even seen one of these much less tried one but I checked the recent eBay prices and they are not cheap these days by any stretch. If you have $2000+ to spare for one, there's a LOT of competition out there. 

For about the same amount of money as what the most recent one sold for in the US you could get a brand new Oberheim SEM Pro AND a well maintained Juno 6 (or a Deepmind 12), or you could get a Juno 106 AND a JX-3p AND the programmer for the JX-3p, etc, etc. etc.

EDIT: actually Juno 106 prices seem to be on the rise again, so that second one might be a bit of an overstatement, last time I looked at them last fall when someone was asking me for opinions on a first polysynth, they seemed to be back down in the $900 range, near the top of the Juno 6's, but now they're more like $1100.  But you could still get like 90% of the way there if you have VX-600 level funds available.

But it does seem to be a really cool little (the littleness is part of the appeal of it for me, reminds me of the form factor of some of the Soviet and Italian synths I've always wanted to try but never will) synth.

FWIW I've had an Akai MFC42 for years and if the filters in the VX600 are anything like it they're going to sound very clean and smooth, but really nice.  The MFC42 used to get a lot of the from people who wanted it to be a Sherman Filterbank or something (it's about as far from that as you can get in terms of its sound), but it's really nice if you take it on its own terms.  Seems like Akai knew what they were doing with analog for a while there before they got bought and sold 4 or 5 times and started making boxes named after animals.

The filters are not those ones. They are quite raw sounding synths in contrast to their rompler like look.

Yeah I've had a lucky little windfall and ordered one. I'm also getting a digitakt and they should play together nicely in multimbral mode. Will upload some clips later.

The VX600 uses Curtis chips 3372 (VCF) and 3374 (VCO).

Awesome, congratulations!

If those two Curtis chips are among the ones that are being made again you might want to grab some spares while you can just to be on the safe side, since a synth like that is a pretty big investment.

Some of the  the other akai analog poly's are multitimbral which is cool. Not sure if this one is tho

WOnder what tracks feature this one a bunch? The tuss always sounded like it had a decent bit of modular stuff going on. 

Found an akai ewi 3020m on ebay for 250quid

Has 3340cem double osc chip

And a roland mks 50 for 400 quid

8 voices for my digitakt to sequence

Fuck VX 600s

Turned up broken after being sold as in excellent condition.

Shit happens.

What's the matter with it?  Getting it repaired or did you get a refund?

If it's repairable ou might try for a partial refund to cover the cost of repairs, but on an expensive item that's probably going to be tricky to negotiate.

I try to only buy old synths locally if they come up or travel to pick up. I'd hate to be in a situ where you have to argue the facts.

Good luck man, gutted for you.

Guy's paying for it to go to the repairman. :) hope they can fix it

Screen glows bright blue, doesnt display anything. Plays sound though. The repairman is really good ive heard. Must have been ups dropped the box.

Couriers don't actually give a fuck, I've seen them fling boxes around the back of a van even when they are covered in fragile tape.

Yeah, private couriers especially.

I talked to someone a few years back who had worked at one of the main FedEx distribution hubs in the midwest and he told me that the actual conveyor belt system in the main sorting room was designed in a multilevel arrangement that guaranteed any package passing though would be dropped about 3 feet onto a hard surface a minimum of once, because they literally went down a conveyor belt past some sorters, then fell off the end down to the next conveyor belt running in the opposite direction where the next group of sorters were. and IIRC it was three or four levels of that.  He claimed that anything with any weight to it should at minimum be double boxed with some kind of heavy padding between the inner and outer boxes, but realistically even that wasn't enough.  My experience hasn't ben nearly that band but I also rarely send or recieve anything heavy - we were talking about shipping a Tascam 388, which seems like a bad idea.

I can't speak for other countries but the postal service in the USA is a lot better than the private couriers.on the shipping side, although occasionally they'll mess up a delivery but that's usually on Fridays when my local branch has to use outside contractors because they've had so much of their funding cut in the last couple years (because of lobbying efforts by the private couriers who have been working to choke out the public postal systems in the USA and Canada for decades).

For price and reliability I would never choose a private company for delivery.

Anyhow that's very cool of the guy to pay for it to be repaired, it sounds like it's probably not that bad a problem.  Could be as simple as a loose ribbon cable or even a battery that's low, I've had a few things that would just display blank screens when the patch memory battery was low.  No warning or anything, just a blank screen.  Even the TG33 I just got, that's supposed to have a low battery warning, worked fine in play mode but would malfunction in edit mode and COULDN'T PERFORM ITS OWN BATTERY SELF TEST because the battery was just a bit low (down from 3.3v to around 2.5v, not even that far gone) so maybe you'll be lucky and it'll be a really minor thing.

Got a few new tracks up on soundcloud with the vx 600 on midrange pad duties.

www.soundcloud.com/bran1983

Btw what happened to chesney?