We went to our favourite music shopkeepers this month and said, "Them equipment manuals, your customers must praise them or damn them. So what's the best and worst manual you've seen recently?" And this is what they said.

BEST

Ensoniq ESQ1: "Comprehensive and easy to read, good size type, expressed in lay terms. It assumes you know nothing about synthesis in general, and is easy to understand given the complexity of the synth."

Roland TR505: "Well laid-out — anyone can read it and make sense of it. And there's no translation/spelling mistakes — there was a Yamaha manual once that actually printed 'fuck' when they meant 'screw'."

Roland MC500: "It's a very complex bit of equipment, but the manual does it more than justice, and is an object lesson to manual writers. Follow this manual to the letter and everything will work perfectly."

Tascam Porta Two: "It tells you exactly what to do and doesn't assume knowledge of recording like the earlier 244 mish-mash."

Yamaha TX81Z: "Obviously written by an American rather than a Japanese: clear step-by-step instructions, useful additional data, and a good index so you can immediately find what you want. Let's hope this is a model for future Yamaha manuals — except the MIDI section, which is erroneous."

WORST

Akai S900: "Yeuch. Disgustingly brief — it's only two pages long and it's an £1800 machine. Read it — and start again."

Akai X7000: "Of legendary status amongst poor manuals — garbage. Full of bad translations, and errors too. One way to use it is to start at the back and work your way from there. Smocks of being written by someone who knows too much about it."

Korg DDD5: "If you didin't know about drum machines you wouldn't know what it was on about — it assumes you've used a lot of things before you reach this machine."

Sequential Circuits Studio 440: "The actual functions referred to in the manual and on the machine are completely different. A lot of the statements are extremely brief. You quickly throw the manual down in disgust."

Yamaha DX7 (original): "A flimsy booklet that doesn't explain anything. Desperate. Too complicated, and too much 'refer to...'."

And now of course you're going to say: "But they haven't mentioned the really obvious one!" If you have a manual that you think is completely brilliant or nauseatingly crap-laden, then write to Manuals/Smoke, Making Music, (Contact Details), and tell us all about it.