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My son actually has a Yam Portasound in the dark reaches of his bedroom , may try and retrieve it.
3 OSCS into a mixer > filter > 2 Lfo's > mod envelope > amp envelope > effects engine.
Plus and arpeggiator, vocoder and audio in (to the filters).
Once you have your head around how subtractive synthesis works it's grown up enough not to be junked.
Headphone out or audio out (stereo or mono) into an interface / amp of your choice.
Onboard power (kettle lead) so no wall wart.
An absolute neglected gem of a synth (i.e. cheap to buy now), based on the Kstation and before that the bass station which was Chris Hugget design (WASP / OSCar), so bags of credibility. The only thing missing is a sequencer but you can sort that later.
http://www.vintagesynth.com/novation/ks45r.php
Honestly, it's just so well laid out. Accessibility can make or break a synth. I have a Korg Prophecy which is immense but the menu diving means it sits doing nothing. The KS, just switch it on, plug in some earphones and in seconds you are swirling textures about like a pro.
Obviously far more to this than I realised.
Definitely some reading to be done.
http://media.soundonsound.com/sos/feb04/images/qacontentsnovation.l.jpg
Other suggestions on the used market might be Yamaha AN1x, A Nord Lead of some sort, Roland JP8000, Korg MS2000, other Novations, etc. All are VA polysynths so you can pick those chords out, but they will do monophonic stuff too, and many have on-board effects (Nord excepted f'rinstance) so sound good straight out of the box. All you need is headphones or an amp/hifi to get going.
If you're content with one-finger prodding and knob twiddling you have further options including new real analogue stuff from Korg (some mentioned above), the Arturia monosynths (very good I'm told) and a few others. You'll pretty much definitely need an external reverb, delay or multifx though else they'll sound pretty flat.
If money's no object get a new Prophet 6 Otherwise the classifieds at Sound On Sound are a good place to hunt along with the usual ebay and Gumtree suspects.
There's a KS rack going on Synthesizer Freaks fb page,
I play guitar and take photos of stuff. I also like beans on toast.
The downsides are that there are no effects, and it wasn't a good earner for Alesis so it was dropped ages ago in favour of the Micron (which has fewer keys and far fewer knobs, and is consequently much harder to fathom, though it uses the same great sound engine.) This means that if you want one, it's second-hand only.
Again, it's a good plan (and good fun if you're as nerdy as me) to research what synths are behind your favourite tracks / genre / era to give a better idea of what you're looking for and why.