I continue to think Casio is leaving money on the table by not releasing a retro CZ synth. The anti-digital synth bias has mostly faded from electronic music in the current generation. Yamaha and Korg and Behringer and Elektron and others have cashed in on FM nostalgia. Only Behringer is operating in the hardware phase distortion space, and their implementation is cheap but worse than a real CZ in some dimensions (more limited polyphony, terrible capacitive keyboard). Korg just boxes up a Raspberry Pi in a sturdy chassis with a decent keybed and some knobs and sells it at a huge markup. No reason Casio couldn't do that, too. I'd love a new CZ synth.

Disclaimer: I'm an admin there.

I still love them though. Phase distortion can make some really great noises with a bit of coaxing.

I have the bigger CZ-5000 with the built in sequencer I bought used in the 90s and still play. I think it was probably used most famously by Drexciya but the Kevin Saunderson "Reece Bass" sound was everywhere in early jungle.

I like this CZP-1 soft synth. It's pretty nice once you flip the flow from left to right to top to bottom.

I have CZ-101 and CZ-5000, I tried many emulations and wrote some myself but I also read technical manuals and what goes on analog side, after DAC, oh boy. The synth is is digital at the core but the sound is very much shaped by the rest of the synth.

I love that machine.

I was just listening this week after not having listened in some time, as it's the 30th anniversary of Hi Scores.