Waldorf Protein

This sounds like nothing else I own. It has gritty 8 bit wavetable oscillators with authentic aliasing and some additional noise generators to make it sound even dirtier, but in a most positive kind of way. It reminds me a bit of the sound character of my old Amiga computer, but in a kind of "dirty hi-fi" flavor. FX are really good too.

UI is good, for the most part intuitive and easy to use. I don't mind simplified envelope controls, only the FX controls can be a bit fiddly to use at first. Build quality feels good as do all the controls. It packs a lot of interesting features, and while it's obviously no Iridium, for the price and form factor it's pretty impressive. It's even multitimbral. Sadly you can't exclude individual parts from FX or use different FX on different parts (at least not at the time of this review), so the most useful modes are round/random robin or layered (which are great). Multitimbrality is also very easy to set up, you can even load individual parts from other presets.

All in all, this is not your typical all purpose bread&butter type of synth, even though it can do any type of sound and it sounds gorgeous, even the raw oscillators, not to mention if you put it through some nice reverb to augment those nice harmonics it produces. But it definitely has a specific character, which is quite the opposite of most modern ultra clean sounding softsynths. Great stuff.