NEO Instruments Ventilator II 4-stars Reviews

Excellent sound, but needs better interfacing

I bought this in 2020 so I could play my Hammond C3 during lockdown without annoying my neighbours too much. I normally use a Leslie 122XB or a Leslie 2101.

Physically it's a nice solid metal box with conveniently-sized controls and pedals. I usually have it sitting on the bench next to me so I can get at the overdrive control while playing.

The sound of the emulation is excellent - it didn't take very much tweaking to match the speed dynamics of my 122XB, and the overdrive and blend controls give a decent range of sounds. In my home environment I think it sounds better than micing up either of the real Leslies - and it's certainly a lot less hassle.

Connecting up a real halfmoon switch is no problem - it's not obvious from the manual, but the "switch 2" mode works with a slow-stop-fast switch.

Feeding audio in from the organ at the right level was more difficult. You really do need to adjust it to just below the point where the overload LED lights for it to sound good - I ended up building an external attenuator to get the level from the organ down far enough. So wishlist item 1: the Vent really should have an input attenuator control (a preset pot on the back would be fine).

The output is a pair of unbalanced jacks. This is OK for a guitar pedal but you should budget for a stereo DI box if you need to run the output over anything but the shortest of cable runs. Wishlist item 2: balanced outputs.

Wishlist item 3 is that it'd be awfully nice to have some basic reverb built in. With the rotors stopped, the overdrive wound up a bit and a bit of external reverb added, it does a good PR40-style jazz sound; if there's DSP space this could be built in.

Overall this wasn't a cheap device, but I've been pretty happy with it and I think it's fair value for money. If you're using it with a digital organ or as a guitar effect then you'll probably be very happy with it; for use with a real organ it's a bit more effort to set up but does work well.