Let me start with a little disclaimer: my mp3 demo of the factory patches consists largely of pads and weird FX sounds, which I picked and focused on in this case. Of course apart from these, the Z1 has lots of bells, flutes, clavs, el-pianos, and all that crap that I find to be too banal. So I don't include them (simple as that).

So! Meet the Korg Z1 aka "Polyphonic Prophecy", which is a kind of misnomer, because it does not incorporate all solutions from the Prophecy (and I sense a slight difference in the tone). It's like a Wavestation of the 21st century, I'd call it. But also very far beyond that. There's no point in presenting its features. They're in such vast numbers, that I feel small. You can look at it as a digital modular, since you can connect sources and destination almost as you wish (well, you CAN'T mix everything with anything like in real modular, but the matrix is quite deep). I was in the middle of creating a patch. I felt like I needed this routing. I dived into the menu, and I found it. I felt that I might improve it by adding another one (and I don't mean basic stuff like frequency cutoff). It was also there. And this step was repeated like... six times. And I found all the routings I needed . It's all there. You can even be a fucking snake charmer, cause Z1 has various scales, including arabic.

When I hear the cliched phrase about "limitless possibilities of creating sounds", I always smile and take it with a great pinch of salt, but with Z1 you can really feel that the road to the bottom is quite loooooooooooooooooooong (assuming that we exclude the Roland V-Synth, otherwise its grandeur seriously dwarfs the Z1 experience). However, the other side of this coin is that even though the synth is very versatile and deep, I don't think it will be favored to the same extent across all those sound domains. Limitless possibilities - yes, but not limitless plasticity of the overall sound. It's specific, very specific. You might find it muffled and fuzzy, and soon frustrating. Let's say that the Z1 is a tool for a patient sound sculptor who dabbles in movie effects, or for a person who has a natural inclination to enjoy industrial, glitchy & synthetically-mangled genres of music. If you're a performer and you don't want to get into anything else than pure & quick music - think it over. Try a Roland JP-8000 for basses, a Nord Lead for leads, a Korg Radias for pop-fun (if you worship genuine analogue sound - go away and buy a fucking Minimoog).

Should you be in two minds as to which model you should buy, let's say that what gives the upper hand to the Z1 is its polyphony and its hardware control possibilities, whereas what makes the Prophecy better is its portability and ease of editing during live shows.