One of Dawesome’s strengths (so far at least) has been to make complex sound design highly visual and accessible, which for me is a niche not that well served in the synth scene (moving through tones via a colour wheel anyone? ) There’s a simplicity to their early synths that’s very appealing, especially for people like me who are basically allergic to sound design.
The resynthesis model in this one is just a little bit… strange. From my early tests, the sounds I get with like for like samples are inharmonic, grainy, and honestly not super nice. The marketing almost makes it sound like you drop a sound in and that’s the end of it - but it’s not quite the drag & drop simplicity implied by the promo materials. I just watched a stream with Peter and he distanced it as being a sample playback machine, which is a little different to how it’s marketed. Novum is different because you can get interesting sounds without using the detailed tools which makes it super powerful, quick, easy, fun etc.
I think where this works well is a) you can throw longer samples into it (not true of all samplers) and b) it can use that sound as an exciter for the physical modelling sounds. That to me seems to be its strength, and it’s real advantage is in how you can then use that as an exciter for the oscilators and filters underneath that, almost to the point that your original sample might even just sound like noise. Perhaps the selling point of this should be a little narrower, but for that use case I think it’s really good. Maybe they could rein the marketing back a tad on the sample point and emphasise the physciial modelling aspects.