Subtractive is a four oscillator synth, with each oscillator featuring Triangle, Pulse, Saw, White Noise, Pink Noise, and Spinal Saw waveforms. You can't load samples or use sine waves, but I guess you can use Collective for those types sounds.
Subtractive is purely a subtractive synth: there's no FM, additive, or other types of synthesis in here, again remembering that Collective provides you FM and S+S synthesis. In addition to the four oscillators, you get four LFOs, with a dozen different waveforms, as well as multiple ways to assign or integrate them into your sounds.
And, like Collective, there are four envelopes, assignable, with up to 12 stages. You can punch in specific values, or use the graphic editor to stretch and pull your envelope to an exact shape. I really like this.
There are a pair of filters, like Collective, but with more options, settings, and things to screw around with. Given this is a subtractive synth, I think that makes sense...although the filter section is a bit busy in terms of its layout.
The bad?
Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see so much repetition with Collective's presets: there are a lot of sounds to try out and experiment with, but I was disappointed that so many are already in Collective. I hope Tracktion considers a content update, eliminating the duplicates with Collective (well, you can keep a few duplicates for the educational value if they provide alternative ways to synthesize the same sound) and having almost fully unique Subtractive sounds.
Also, there can be a delay of up to 4 seconds between dragging an instance of Subtractive to a track and being able to click on anything in its window. Given all it can do, that's probably a necessary evil, but keep that in mind.
Also, I did suffer two crashes with Subtractive: the first when clicking in its window--the fonts went corrupt (this was reported before by Stuttaton, and his picture here is basically what happened to me).
And right as I clicked on this jazzed-up font screen, Waveform shut down hard.
Secondly, I went through another crash to desktop when opening Collective on a second track while Subtractive was open on the first.
So there might be some risks...
Overall, I'd have to say Subtractive, by itself, isn't nearly reason enough to upgrade to W10. However, the workflow improvements (ah, that Actions window!) and the ease of positioning windows and frames is a definite winner for W10.
Given a little more time, I think Subtractive can be as impressive as Collective is. Get some fresh content for it (rather than copies of Collective's presets), simplify the filter page layout, and keep an eye on its stability, and I think it would be a great partner to Collective.
Welp, those are my quick thoughts. I haven't dug deep (or really at all) into its raw synthesis capabilities like I have with Collective, but I don't see anything that will lead to me think Subtractive would be anything less than impressive.
