Vermona PERfourMER MkII CV/Gate

Looking at the Perfourmer as you open the box, you expect it to be physically quite heavy, but when you lift it out it is surprisingly light. The standard of manufacture and finish is A1 excellent and the multiple knobs and switches are well laid-out. When you connect MIDI and your mixer, setting up the voices is fairly straightforward and you can configure it as a four-osc mono with seperate filters for each osc, plus cross-mod/FM between oscillators and hard-sync so the sound is massive. Modulation is limited to one shared env and one lfo per voice, so is a little limited, but the awesome 24dB Vermona LPF and FM more than makes up for this - the sound is huge! Lush and rich and velvety but capable of snappy and hard edged tones too. The envelope response is 'snappy'. Each voice has the option to take an insert (post VCF) and is available as an individual output, as is the raw oscillator. The oscillator can be replaced with a seperate ext input on each channel too.
Those wishing to play polyphonically get the option to configure the synth as a four voice (single oscillator) poly or a two voice dual oscillator, and although it is a bit fiddly to set all the knobs to the same settings to get a uniform sound, it is worth the effort. Each voice gets its own pan knob so you can make really excellent wide analogue chords - add a bit of PWM and reverb (from your mixer) and you are in heaven.
The cv/gate option functions as you would expect and offers another route to modulate the oscillator frequencies - especially if you use it as an FM drone machine (it is a great drone synth) and throw some moogerfoogers into the inserts. Space is the place!

I am glad I bought this beauty - a real collectors item and quality worthy of the price. Waaay better than a Pro1, and a bigger sound than a Minimoog...

While there might be some other options with more features at this price, this baby is worth it just for the way it sounds.
Even when using just 1 VCO, it's always coming out fat and warm.
I really like the fact there is no need for deep menu diving and you basically get a knob for almost every function.
Another reason to get your hands on this is the analog filter, which you can feed external audio through. A truly brilliant feature.
I still would have loved an option to save patches or a sequencer, but even without those the Per4mer is more than welcome in my studio.