ElectraX

Color me impressed.

Markus Feil and his team have done an excellent job with this synth! There's very little I don't like about it, and all those things are only slight niggles, like the absence of what's becoming an industry standard practice lately, right-clicking for MIDI learn. What's really important is there: THE SOUND.

How does it sound? Completely badass, that's how! It has a deceptively simple layout, but the signal can be radically modulated, even within the oscillator section. The filters are very powerful and sound as juicy and rubbery as you like, or as clinical and precise as you need them to. There are many different types, and all I've tried so far leave nothing to be desired. The new Moog filter is outstanding, and the fractal filters, though pretty bizarre, can allow for some really original, noisy, nasty sounds. Dubstep kids will have a blast with these!

The oscillator section is simply superb. There's a lot here, and I won't go into all the details, but I've not yet found an easier to use Wavetable implementation in a very long time. I'm very, very happy to have a synth with powerful wavetable capabilities that doesn't live in hardware. It's about time! I can't wait to hear the wavetables that get added in future updates. The stock ones are already incredibly useful, but I'd like to hear lots of morphing, twisting, stretching ones. The more the merrier! All the other oscillator types, including sample players, are pretty wicked. I'm really excited to see where all this goes in the future. The purity and power of these sources is astonishing... no aliasing or digital fluffiness anywhere to be found!

This synth is a dream to program once you understand the basics. You can whip out fantastic-sounding patches one after the other once you know your way around. Saving is not a hassle and is very straightforward. Creating a new patch is made easy with several useful templates on hand.

The effects, though often not complicated, generally sound superb. The reverbs seem especially tuned to synth sounds right out of the box so you don't have to go tweaking. The modulation effects sound very rich and sweet. The delays are quite flexible, and everything else generally does its job with aplomb. No complaints!

All around, this is a fantastic-sounding synthesizer, and the various Output modes, such as Psychoacoustic, are really the icing on the cake. There are very few, if any, soft synths currently available that are capable of sounding this rich and powerful with so little tweaking. I have many, and I love a lot of them, but this just makes everything so simple... everything's laid out sensibly, and I can go about as fast as I can think. Brilliant!

Now, if they'd just let me MIDI learn knobs without accidentally sending me to their website every other time...