I love the minimoog d & I think it’s great that Behringer has produced these clones as a nod to the original item at great savings. Analog synths are easier than ever to purchase these days.

I’d say that my fingers are about as fat as anybody else’s. I understand that a person would prefer knobs to be further apart. But let’s suspend our judgment for a moment and ask ourselves, whether or not the knobs are indeed, too close together on the SE02: if they are too close together, they’re difficult to maneuver without moving or bumping into another knob, and that’s changing the sound away from where you’re trying to program it. If they’re not too close together, that means that you were able to maneuver the knobs without accidentally turning a knob that is next to it.

So now that we’ve gotten past that, let’s look at the feature set of each of these. The Behringer model D has some MIDI implementation And a few other additional features that the original minimoog synthesizer did not have. But it also has many of the original limitations which no modern synthesizer now has, unless it is also a copy or nod to an older design. One of these limitations is a lack of presets. This is a pretty serious limitation.

Roland has saw fit to actually team up with studio electronics which is an outfit that has been creating their own product by taking basic design of the mini Moog and turning it into a more modern vehicle through what you can play these incredible sounds. They modernized the minimoog. They turned it into a rackmount unit, and they added a few extra features. Now fast forward to the president, and they have teamed up with Roland, a company which. seemed to be ridiculously hell-bent on never again producing a true analog synthesizer—even though their entire company was originally the bomb Diggity of analog synthesis. I have no idea why Roland has been so reluctant to turn any other modern synthesizers into modern analog synthesizers, but I am glad that they figured out that the SE02 needed to be analog. This thing has a lot of great features and it stands by itself similarly to the original SE1. They even decided to put a on board analog modeling delay and it sounds great. Plus you have this sequencer that’s built-in do you have midi implementations
There’s also a modulation matrix, various additional routings, an extra LFO. THIS IS a step forward from the model D of old whereas the BEHRINGER is a copy with some added modern features. Both are great but The question becomes do you want to have a really ultra cheap clone of the minimoog or do you want to have a modernization of the minimoog with some great modern features that brings it into the 21st-century well, that’s the question that you need to answer before you purchase one of these two items.

Both of them are excellent in my book. The SE two is on another level. It’s totally more classy by far. It stands on its own while harkening back. My 10 cents.

Great mini review! Thanks for sharing

How does the SE-02 compare to the SE-1? I presently have an SE-1 (I bought it (around 20?) years ago when I decided to sell my original Minimoog (I never got it to interface with MIDI properly which was a pain, I really wanted patch memory which you similarly point out here, and I wanted a space-saving rack instead of yet another (and not a good one either) keyboard -but definitely wanted to keep the sound!).

To me, it sounded like my old Minimoog but with all the modern features (I kept the Minimoog for a while to compare them both before deciding to sell it or not). The knob settings were a little different for the same sounds, and I hear some people complain about its envelopes being "slow" compared to the original Minimoog, but I can't say I've noticed that (or don't know how to check).
All in all I have to say I don't regret selling the Minimoog (although I could have gotten a LOT more for it today than back then!) and the SE-1 is definitely a more user-friendly synth.

I suppose the SE-02 continues where the SE-1 left off?

Well, I have a new ever experienced the SE1, That being said, I would hesitate to consider the SE02 to be an actual continuation of it, because it is additionally a true collaboration between Roland and studio electronics. That being what it is, it has to be wedged into the format that Roland is producing it in which could be considered its largest limitation (or some people may consider that an actual advantage, because there are other products that fit the same format).
Plus, because they were collaborating with Roland, the price point has been able to be kept very low. I think it sounds great. I haven’t actually A/B’d it with a mini Moog , though. I’m grateful that I still own my mini moog, but if I was a young musician trying to put together some analog synths I would definitely be looking at both of these products that are mentioned here. I do believe that the Roland provides easily the extra hundred dollars in value that it is priced at.

This sound on sound reviews, incredibly accurate in my opinion: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/roland-se-02