do not feed after midnight

OK these damn things are addictive. Woke up this morning and the studio was full of tiny chirping little critters. From Japan.
Slight exaggeration. There were two more than before. And no, I didn't buy the SH09 and System 100... yet ... Although my eBay account is twitching like an excited puppy choking on snails at the prospect of owning a near mint and fairly rare Roland SH5. More on that later.The SH09 and System 100 are on loan from good friend & fellow producer & analogue synth modding maniac  CY Kong. I wanted an opportunity to hear the sound of the small Roland's before buying into the dynasty, and he very generously gave me these fine examples for a while. So far I've had them for 48 hours and am starting to consolidate my thoughts. Having only used an old Juno and SH101 in the past (different Roland fish) I have to say that the comparison between the Roland's and my Korg MS20 is quite clear:The Roland VCO are much brighter in tone than the Korg. The SH09 being brightest of the three. In particular, the square waves really have some bite, that makes the Korg sound ever-so slightly muffled. I was struggling to make some really harsh top-end lead sounds on my MS20 (could possibly be my incompetence) so it's nice to be vindicated, and to know the frequencies are just not there. But like everything in life there is a trade-off. The Roland low pass VCF seems to thin out considerably at higher resonance levels and - while both 09 and 100 filters are still damn fine - just they lack the low end grunty balls so obviously present when you push the Korg. No bad thing - the sonic overlap between the two brands is slight and that means buying one of these is not a waste of resources. I need justification when it comes to shopping! Aside, patching one synth through another yielded some great results.perverse multi-orifice synth orgy action... Nord is embarrassedI did not compare envelope generators. People often cite the speed and snappiness of attacks when describing the quality of a synth, but this fine surgical work is all stuff I will do in my DAW. All I'm interested in is modulation options and tone.I found the single VCO architecture of these Roland's a bit too limiting for my style of sound design, hence the pending purchase of the quasi-mammoth SH5. I was looking at an SH02 but frankly the usual online auction prices for those are farcical. The SH5 is also higher money than I'd like to pay, but they do not appear very often so I can almost live with that. If I transfer the cash really quickly it won't matter so much.Really enjoying my new journey into vintage analogue land. I'm already producing more music - which is the main reason for all this junk - and the sounds coming out of these things are way closer to what I hear in my head. Not to totally dismiss VA hardware and plug-ins though - they have huge amounts of power and can match any hardware one-for-one given a skilled programmer - but therein was the problem, I spend far too long programming the dirt, drift, clunk & wobble which just naturally appears with the old gear. Like it or not! Am glad I made the decision to stop throwing money at Steve Jobs for a few years and spend my budget on skunky old out-of-tune toys that don't behave themselves.ok...now I remember why we stopped buying hardware 6 years ago