Thanks for the listen and comments

@Brad: The reason I was looking for a hardware vocal harmoniser was to replace the voice we lost when our previous drummer quit the band. At the same time I was looking for a hardware fx-processor to use with the DAW. Importand for me where:
1: unit has to be usable on stage: so no software solution and no 19" rackmounted device.
2: unit has to be able to be "believable" on stage: no robottic sounds
3: unit has to be versatile: I wanted to use it as an fx-processor in my home-studio
4: Since we have no single instrument in the band to feed the lead-input for key-recognition, the unit had to be able to "swallow" whatever music was presented to it in order to determin the right key.

The VoiceLive 2 was the only unit that could do all the tasks. I also tried the Harmony-G (which takes guitarinput to determin the key) and the Digitech VoiceLive 4. These units sound great too. There is a difference in quality of the created harmonies. These differences are however not all too obvious when using the units live on stage. Also there are differences in the number of fx you can use. For example the VoiceLive 2 has a doubling function you can use aside from the 4-part harmonies you can create. The choir-function doubles the harmonyparts thus creating a real choir-sound.

Conclusion: when you want to use a unit to create harmonies live on stage and you are using a guitar or a MIDI-keyboard you can use any of the mentioned boxes (try them all before deciding: sound and feel are very personal!!!)
When you want to use the unit for recording and you want the best sounding canned harmonies available at this moment you'll want the VoiceLive 2.

It might be fun to do some real unbiassed double blind testing on this site: We'll gather some people that own a vocal harmoniser and use one single voice, sung over a BiaB arrangement to provide the vocal input. We'll post only the harmonie-parts as a mp3 on a site (I can spare some webspace). Ofcourse the mp3's will only be named "test-1" "test-2" etc. We'll let everybody decide which sounded best for him/her and then, after one or two weeks we'll put the names of the units with the mp3's.

So people who own a hardware harmoniser and interested in this experiment, give me a pm and we'll work something out.

Mike
www.mikewever.nl