Korg Maxi-Korg 800DV

Picture this: back in 1975, Korg dropped Japan's first duophonic synthesizer, packing two full Mini-Korg voices into one beastly keyboard for sounds that could growl like nothing else on the scene.

At its heart, you've got two identical VCOs per voice, each dialing in octaves from 64' to 2', waveshapes like triangle, saw, square, PWM pulse, plus pink and white noise, all feeding into independent lowpass and highpass filters—those famous "traveler" VCFs—with dedicated ADSR envelopes. Two LFOs handle vibrato and modulation, a ring modulator spits out metallic weirdness, and there's a pulse sub-oscillator for extra low-end punch, topped with chorus/phasor effects and audio I/O loops. The 44-note F-to-C plastic keyboard sits atop a classic wood-sided panel splashed with color-coded knobs—blue, red, yellow—for upper and lower voice tweaking, though no pitch wheel or mod wheel means hands-on slider fun instead.

Players love its fat monophonic stacks or tricky duophonic leads, with that aggressive, characterful tone heard on tracks from Kitaro, Vangelis, and Soft Cell—endless tweakability keeps it a hidden gem for vintage hunters.