Scrolling through these sounds and the presets is as simple as rotating the knob to the left of the main LED readout, but be aware that this is Minimax's only display screen. Once you've made a sound, you can save it to one of 128 user locations. All six buttons have a bright LED built in, so monitoring your current effects setup is a breeze. These might include delay feedback amounts, or the rate of 'ping-pong', for example. The last three buttons, labelled Param 1, 2 and 3 allow you to tweak three parameters relevant to the currently selected effect. The first button acts as an effects bypass, the second selects the effect type from five variants, and the third acts as a dry/wet effects mixer control. This is accessed via the six Effects buttons below the synth's Mixer section. These effectively amount to some polyphony - with up to six voices available - and a very useable effects section. The main reason for this is that Creamware haven't elected to pack loads of new tricks into this box alongside the Minimoog bits - this really is a Moog with a couple of additions. Even if you're old-school enough to think that analogue synths should occupy entire rooms of your house, this won't offend you. In many ways, Minimax feels like the purist's choice. It makes for a very playable instrument, and we'd have no qualms about adding a Minimax to a live set-up. This is much more gratifying than using a mouse to make changes, as it's lovely to have real controls to grab hold of. You can jam away, playing one-handed while using your spare hand for editing. There's something very pleasing about having this tweakability right in front of you. You'll be shaping sounds to your heart's content and stumbling over soundalikes from various artists all the while. Dial up the three oscillators, use the mixer section to blend them, then add a little white noise for some grit. The oscillators ooze character and the filter can create anything from the sublime to the ridiculous. This synthesizer delivers a sound that's indistinguishable from the original Minimoog and the familiar combination of warmth and punch greet you straight out of the box. Round the back you'll find the usual suspects - three MIDI ports, stereo input/output, a 12V AC adaptor port with power on/off rocker switch and a USB connection to connect the Minimax straight to your computer.