I still have one I pull out of my “creativity closet”; a place for synths not currently in my 9 keys not currently using, but regularly rotate them out to force myself to work differently and change things up.
The filters on the Ion are quite nice, as are the plethora of modulation options. This may seem trite to some but when you learn to route modulation destinations to after touch and come across a great synth with not so great keys, as the Ion has, compared to most of my others, you really miss it.
However, even with that, this is one very versatile synth that you can do ALL the classic filter emulations as well as really out there, crazy sounds. The interface is nice and screen quite nice, easy to program on the surface but what lay beneath is a beast of a synth to where I never felt hampered by 8 note poly because it has such a massive sound.
The external input to be able to run anything through filters, et al, is by far my favorite feature with it. Pretty sure the vocoder formant has 40 bands to it…even if you wanted a very capable vocoder and only utilized it for that–well worth it.
Practically got a Micron for nothing as well, which has much better keys and is exact same synth engine with enhancements…although you sacrifice for a very minimalistic interface, it’s worth what they go for (Miniak same engine as Ion…both companies were owned by Alesis, now Numark, in case people did not know), because the Micron adds a cool real time phrase sequencer which with the Ion’s great sound.
If it were cost effective to have a pro Fatar set of keys placed on Ion, it would at least make me want to use it more. Alesis also placed an enhanced Ion engine within one of their last major synths, a workstation called the Fusion, which has several synth engines as well as sample library loading abilities.
