I’ve tried it for a few hours and imho it’s not the total no brainer synth that the spec sheet makes it look like. At least sound wise - the built quality is fantastic and it looks and feels awesome. The screen is also surprisingly helpful, the UI strikes a good balance between hands on control even for things like LFO and aftertouch settings and additional info/settings with the help of the screen. Only thing weird to me as an Elektron user was that the shift button stays in shift unless you click it a second time, so no holding and releasing like the fct button. If I was only judging built, look and UI, it definitely beats the Rev2 I used to own. The knobs felt better to me and I appreciated that some of them were a bit bigger.
Take everything from me about the sound with a big grain of salt, as I have very limited experience with huge analog polys (Rev2, Murmux) or vintage synths (only emulations of Rolands). I wouldn’t post this if it was a synth that a lot of other people had experience with. I think my issues with it were personal and due to the fact that I lack experience with this kind of synth. But I wouldn’t exactly call it an instant sweetspot machine, it has a character of its own and takes some time getting used to, which might be a good thing to a lot of you.
My feeling was that the oscillators are quite wild and really rich. Of all things, they reminded me a bit of AR’s DVCO. This of course is a very good thing to many people, I guess that’s what people seek in a vintage sounding analog poly. Just detune the two oscillators a bit and you already have a very rich sound with a lot of movement that feels organic, without any use of LFOs etc. For me personally, this means that I have to tame this richness a lot with the filter, and I didn’t really click with the filter. I don’t have much experience with ladder filters, but I was surprised how much of the bass gets lost when introducing a bit of resonance. Even without resonance, I struggled to get a good bass fundament. There a two (!) sub oscillators, so in theory, it should be very easy to give it a lot of bass. However, I found it hard to find the sweetspot where the bass is noticeable but doesn’t muddy the whole sound. In general, I often had the feeling that the sound sits somewhat strangely in the middle/background, even without using the not so impressive effects. Any change to the effects btw result in noticeable digital fragments/noises, this has already been pointed out by other people. They’re definitely not suited for being live tweaked. I also struggled with the (reverse) sawtooth that was really abrupt – might be expected, but it sounds smoother on any other synth I’ve played so far. The attack times also didn’t have as wide a range as I wished for pads, maybe this can be changed in the settings though. Lastly, the outputs were quite noisy when there’s no sound playing. This was also the case on my Rev2, but not as extreme, I’m sure it can be solved by going into a balanced input.
Edit: one thing I really hated was the stereo spread options. More precisely, it’s dialled in by default in an init patch, which means you always have to deactivate the two stereo spread options. They’re also baked into every preset. Imo it’s an unnecessary feature that makes things rather unusable. It’s not that complicated to deactivate it, but still annoying.