I recently bought my second Prophet '08. It is a beautiful instrument with a warm and rich sound. It offers eight-voice polyphony, two oscillators, four LFO's, precise envelopes, and a five-octave velocity sensitive keyboard with after touch. The pulse width modulation is quite smooth. A stack mode allows you to simultaneously combine two entirely different patches, though with only four-voice polyphony per patch. It offers also a mono mode with many variables.

The Prophet '08 is a fairly simple instrument to master, yet the possiblilties are extensive. I really like its conservative appearance. It looks like a musical instrument that's simply meant to be played, with nothing fancy or pompous. It's also quite light weight and compact, being only as large as, say, two five octave keyboards placed back to back.

I can't say enough about the Prophet '08 synthesizer. It may not be the most sophisticated synthesizer available, but for the basics of analog synthesizer sound, it's superb.

Well okay. This is supposed to be the new fantastic hot synth of this year. Backordered always and near impossible to find anywhere. I was lucky to find one to buy, and I wasn't too overjoyed. Let me tell you that this board is as basic as it could get. Two ocillators, three waves; sawtooth, triangle and pulse. No effects; not even reverb. All the presets are the same, and only basic parameters can be edited. The arpegiator only has up, down and random, there is a four part step sequencer that the original Prophet 5 didn't have, and it has four lfo's, two filters and an envelope generator section. Yeah. It sounds analog. Fat, warm and raw. But it still has digital ocillators to compensate for tuning issues, (it does stay in perfect tune) rather than true analog ocillators, but does have analog filters and vca's. So it is somewhat of a hybrid. So what does it matter, after all an ocillator is nothing more than an electronic component on a circuit board that produces a buzzing or beeping sound when electricity passes through it. It is then shaped into the freaky outerspace sounds we hear with the filters and envelopes. The presets are basic, mostly Juno 106 leads and Oberheim pads. It is a good looking board though. Looks just like it stepped out of the late 1970's early Eighties times. Only drawback are the knobs are endless encoders, rather than start and stop pots, and their shafts are weak and bend if you turn them too hard, kinda' takes the feel of a genuine vintage synth away from this board. Power supply is nice, a simple small lightweight wall-wart instead of huge brick with a cord coming out each end. I had my fill of analogs in the eighties, and I still have the three I bought 25 years ago; Juno 106, Korg Polysix, and Oberheim OB 12. Today I have digitals that blow doors, Korg Radias and Virus TI to name a couple. No analogs could do what they do. The Prophet 08 is just that. A perfectly replicated synth of yesteryear when technology was basic and music was simple. You can't vocode on this thing, there is no usb for software support, and there are only three soundwaves to choose from. It also lacks a bass control for the ocillators; a feature found on a true analog synth; I could not even get a decent Thomas Dolby "She Blinded Me With Science" bass sound. So if you want to play the synth line to The Cars "Just What I Needed", buy the Prophet 08. But if you want to make fantastic, mind blowing music, then buy a good quality digital synth. Analog synthesizers have many issues to deal with. They usually don't work the same if they're dropped, they are expensive to get repaired, and if they contain real analog ocillators such as the Alesis Andromeda, the synth has to be at a certain temperature before you can play it, not to mention tuned each time you get ready to play, they really do suck! On the other hand a good quality digital synth is foolproof, makes more interesting sounds, can be edited further, has more interfacing possibilities with other equipment and will never let you down!