I have both. can confirm… they both rule 
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How is it going, using these two together? Or not?
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Unfortunately, I no longer have either. I have the urge to pick up a M8 again though when the next batch drops.
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I sold. my M8, just didn’t like the workflow…screen very small for a tracker, lots of muscle memory needed. Sound was good and power to size ratio amazing! I did buy an XY and for me it is the better portable. Keyboard style entry for chords/notes makes me more productive, xox drum sequencer more my taste. General use for programming/tweaking synths and fx far easier (knobs!), although the screen is small it isn’t need as much, the form factor in general is just much better for me and small enough!
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I find the synth sounds to be way nicer on the M8, and with tables, envelopes, LFOs and FX, the possibilities are much wider.
And for samples, the M8 is—for me—miles ahead. I like to chop samples and screw with the slices. The XY doesn’t come close.
I do miss easy chord input though.
As for playing vs programming, I like both. Having both in the same machine would be ideal, but on the other hand, I’m happy using the XY to either play the M8 synths, or just sampling stems from the XY into the M8.
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I think the main advantage is that, with the M8, if you think hard enough, you can do any effect you can think of, whereas in OP-XY you have to limit yourself to what’s there.
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For me, a musician and multi instrumentalist, I work by hearing music in my head and then playing in each part, edit some of the midi and onward. This is OP-XY all day long. I’m in this to be having fun and jamming out music is great fun.
I haven’t used a tracker but imagine the programmy-ness to be a rather sterile exercise. For me, I can’t see how programming on a grid would be fun; I want to sing it through an instrument. Maybe because I’m already an engineer/programmer I’m wanting to get away from MS Excel for my music too?
So for me OP-XY is the better value because (I imagine) the M8 would not be fun for me to use.
OP-XY has great sounding synths with somewhat limited sound design capabilities. Lots of bread-n-butter stuff and a multi-sampler. Hardware quality seems very good on mine. It is “ultra-portable”. Has useable speaker.
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To add to this, one niche feature both devices share—quite rare among grooveboxes—is microtonal tunings/microtunings.
Further, on both devices, these tunings are limited to 12-note, octave-repeating tunings, and also, on both devices, there are multiple slots for saved tunings. Beyond that, there are some potentially important differences in their respective implementations of this feature, but it’s probably not worth going into those details here.
Note: I am a longtime M8 user, but have no firsthand experience of the OP-XY, so of the latter device I’m just reiterating the manual and statements I’ve read on this forum, with no knowledge of their accuracy or the reliability of its microtuning implementation. However, I can affirm that the M8 is great.
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