Pros:
- It sounds really great. It has that "analog" sound (yup, I'm just soooo scientific today). It really has a lot of sonic depth.
- It appears to be very versatile and all-round in terms of genre. I could imagine using this for house, trance, new-age ambient, dark gothic illbient, retro 80s synth pop and Warp records'ish electronica.
- A ridiculous amount of features to choose from, and they can be controlled in so many ways because it has...
- Matrix (stuff can control other stuff).
- Vast amounts of internal effects which really have character and are worth using and getting to know.
- Splendid non-weighted keys with both velocity sensitivity, note-off velocity sensitivity (very rare) and aftertouch.
- The LFOs can be both synced across all 12 voices or independent (for that extra chaos. Chaos is good, yes?)
- Impressive looking editor with a scalable UI which both sends and receives MIDI, so that the synth and editor are always in sync.
- Great to see balanced outputs for a change, and a purely analog signal path (you would be able to record it and play it back at half speed and still have nice treble.)
- All envelope generators can have their curve shape adjusted between log, linear and inv.log (-50 to +50).
- It feels pretty hands-on even though it's probably too early to tell after just one evening of testing.
- The arpeggiator and chord thingie are fun and inspiring to use.
- It feels somewhat flimsy and, yeah, one of the slider knobs actually came off. Fortunately it was easy to put back on, and it stayed on afterwards.
- The many built-in reverbs are so-so, and their weak point is the really short reverbs. It works best for doing long reverbs. It has that TC sound. This is probably not really a problem because it's not a drum machine anyway.
- The editor is not a VST but a stand-alone which may pose challenges in terms of usability and integration with your DAW, especially you may experience the editor allocating (stealing) a MIDI device if you wanna run the DAW and editor at the same time.
- The decay curves aren't really well chosen, as the lowest value of -50 is the one that sounds the most natural (resembles an Arp Odyssey or an Oberheim SEM), so I think the range should have been something like -90 to 0 instead of -50 to +50. This is a result of the way the ear perceives volume and fade-outs.