PROS: Small form. Nice microphone on a gooseneck is included. The Vocoder patches work well. The arpeggiator has a lot of different patterns. Novation provides a number of free patches for the synth. The layout of the board looks nice and the flow works ok. The sound is just ok. This a model designed in 2012 and sounds like it.
CONS: If good customer and product support is important to you, don’t buy this synth. My experience with Novation’s customer support was absolutely horrible. I contacted them on their customer support web chat and had the misfortune of having a session with a support tech named “Jeffery”. What a rude guy. He never waited long enough for me to explain the problem so he could provide an answer. Instead, he decided to be rude because I didn’t understand the Librarian software used to load patches on the Mininova. Well, the reason I didn’t understand is Novation never published a user guide for it. They have been making this synth since 2012, so they’ve had a lot of time to do it. They just never did. I guess they don’t want to invest time in an older product line.
Since I couldn’t get help from “Jeffery”, I put in a trouble ticket on Novation’s website. 5 days later I still have not received a response. So back to Thomann this goes. Too many mini synthesizers at this price point to have to deal with that level of (lack of) support.
Morale of the story: Customer support is just as important as the product. If the support is crap, the product is crap. Just sayin’…
