Locally in ireland the A4 has generally been the most common elektron up for sale.
At the moment its all AR mk1’s, for exorbitant prices.
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I’ve had my A4 MKI for around 2 years now and I did the individual out mod (which I’ve never actually used, haha) last summer or so. I’ve debated selling it a few times. Mostly because I find that getting that sweet spot and useful sounds isn’t always super easy. On one hand, I get some fantastic stuff from it, but it tends to take a while to get it good in the mix. On the other hand, sometimes I feel like it’s missing a bit of sparkle, and other times, I need more than 4 voices. I’ll probably keep it given the low resale prices, and it def. is great for the analog OD and filters for external gear, but I can see why people keep selling them off.
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I bought an AK (and A4) after I threw in the towel on my first ProphRev2, which was riddled with bugs.
But I didn’t have enough time to menu dive and make the patches I wanted (I’m almost always interstate working) and had loads of issues with OB freezing so that was out. When I got a working ProphRev2 several months later it’s speed in patching mods and adjusting them was effortless.
I sold my A4 after 6 months of advertising (to an Elektronaut who knew what he wanted) and never managed to sell the AK. Lots of people looked at it, and were scared away by the menus, and vacant looking knobs. Their parting words were always about switching their attention to a ProphRev2 or Subsequent37 or little Korg.
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Thing is though, I’ve seen AKs going for under £600 in recent months. That’s ludicrous! At that price point Vs the alternatives, is the menu diving really so bad? Money isn’t everything I guess when it comes to hardware and UI.
Yep. At best I was offered the same price I just paid for a Strymon Volante 
FAK!
I think I finally got sold on an AK
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The more time goes on and the more I read about what an A4 can do the more I want one… 
It seems so flexible and capable of so much stuff… Let the prices drop! 
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I really don’t mind elektron menu diving at all. I like it in fact 
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Maybe this was all an incredibly sneaky underhand tactic on my part to drive up interest in the A4 in a bid to increase prices 
you’re all falling into the trap!
I jest of course! Glad I started it though as making me want dig my A4 out pronto
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There is very little menu diving if you use OB 1 or OB 2 which works very well. Though I must confess I considered selling mine until I saw the number of A4’s already for sale.
Nah… Personally once I round up enough green pieces of paper they’re going to my broken car…
One day though probably… Personally I can barely imagine having 3 Elektron boxes. With OT and AR I can never seem to get to the end of my mental “ideas to try list”, it grows faster than I can try them. With a 3rd I’d probably never sleep and my friends would have to drag me out of the house…
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I originally wanted the A4 because on paper it’s amazing what they packed into that lil box.
Once I got it, I was kind of disappointed in the sound, and the UI felt awkwardly slow, and sometimes I want multiple outs.
On these forums I had mentioned it and someone challenged me to find it’s sweet spots.
Now I’ve invested so much time crafting sounds that I’ll never give it up.
Sounds amazing and it’s got so much functionality!
It came full circle in a way.
But yeah, it might be time to move to the AK instead, and add some goodies.
Happened to me
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The A4 is actually surprisingly great at drum synthesis, but it does lack the AR’s drum machine specific features (and obvs if you’re using tracks for drums you can’t use them for other things). I’m pretty happy using it as my go-to analog drum box at the moment though 
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I‘m fine with my A4 and still love it to use it for live show. Really never worried about the menu diving. It always felt intuitive. And the sound was quit good … untill i got a prophet 6 
its still a great sequencer with a lot of tricks, especially when working with cv gate. But I can imagine people moving to other synths for another tone charackter, hands on controll like with the Moogs or the lack of Midi in the A4 sequencer
I suppose I could always pull on a black cat suit and go perform cold minimal synth wave with my AK.
Bleep. Bloop. Zummm. Boop.
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Tangential thought:
I’m coming to realize I don’t mind menu diving on groove boxes so much, if they access more features I’ll take more menus. I play guitar, theremin, sing, and play a Little Phatty where I mostly just load saved presets and play the keys while tweaking a few knobs, those are completely immediate. My groove boxes I program to be the rest of the band so I kind of prefer extreme flexibility and options so I can program them before hand but then when I’m playing they just do their thing and I’m not menu diving. I do manually switch patterns, use the scenes/performance, and tweak things live when I’m not playing instruments, but I never really menu dive while actuall practicing live performance…
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Have you guys - who are complaining about the menu diving - ever programmed a DX7 or a D-50 or some of this minimal interface kin? … THAT is menu diving, if not done with a special programmer or a software
BTW … imagine all this functionality of an A4/AK or an other Elektron box on the surface as an one knob per function layout … that would be an impressive control panel … and expensive too
TBH … for me the Elektron boxes don’t even count as a menu diving monster. It’s to hit one of the small buttons below the encoders once or twice and there we go …
IMO @avantronica has it … it’s the complexity and its quite neutral initial sound setting.
There are many sweetspots to be hunted or explored, but it’s not like some of the legendary classics, which have one huge sweetspot only. Switch them on and everybody says WoW … but switch on the initial patch of the A4 and even I would say mehh …
It takes a decent understanding of subtractive synthesis, acknowledgeing the particular strengths of the synth engine, understanding the importance of the combination with the sequencer, and quite some time to dive deep down … but after this … Atlantis … 
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The CV sequencer interests me, or rather my Moog gear, the most…
Hey, come visit me sometime, I’ll make us some tea…
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totally agree. it aint really menu diving. just nicely separated sections, no more than 2 pages deep.
granted there’s menus in the settings but that’s normal.
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