Phase Plant

Alright. Haven't written a review in a bit, but ... I just have to when it comes to Phaseplant. It's THE new kid on the block, I believe taking the crown from Serum. Hear me out:

Modular approach:

You can pretty much define your synth. Number of oscilators (quite a variety of them in fact), samplers, granulators ... then you can route them to effect lines. In those effect lines you have all the power of their snapin (plugins in plugin) system. Stroke of a genius really, because these snapins can share not only audio, but also MIDI triggers, modulations and automatization assignments with the synth. That opens SO many possibilities. ... oh and have I mentioned that the whole oscilator section has audio-rate modulation? It can do any kind of FM routing you can imagine. Wanna do linear FM from a wavetable OSC? No problem. Wanna do exponential FM from a granular sampler? Easy. Phase modulation by static noise? Not even a drop od sweat. Come on. THIS is synth-nerd heaven.

UI:

I have never seen a synth with more thought-through user interface. If you're used to regular V/A's, there will be a learning curve, yes, but stuff you can do in this thing rivals the likes of Falcon or Reaktor. Even surpasses them in some aspects (wavetable editor for example). Yet it never feels like you've stopped making music and started "coding" the synth. It stays ... fun. Love it.

Sound:

Clean. Stable. No high-end smearing usually heard on other "multipurpose" synths. No problems there. It has the same "aspect" as Serum. It's not warm out of the box. You need to make it warm with a bit of saturation and flutter, but hey. That's actually a plus in my book. Makes it more versatile.

Licensing model:

As a cherry on top, these guys NAILED the whole plugin economy. Let's face it, the market is so saturated by now that just selling plugins is not profitable enough to even live by. Only hanful of people can do it and it's usually for brand loyality reasons. That's why you see all the subscription models popping up. But Kilohearts's subscription is the only subscription I don't mind paying. Here's why:

1. They give you reward coupons allowing you to buy the plugins and snapins perpetually in the long run. That signals their confidence in bringing more products for the future. Other devs use subscription just to get lazy. (sorry) ...only Kilohearts understood this properly and offered this buyback thing.
2. When you stop paying, the plugin locks GUIs of all the snapins you don't have license to, but it doesn't cut their sound. So all the presets you have (including your own) still work. That changes subscription from an extortion model to a very sweet offer. You can accept if you want, but it won't screw with your old work if you can't pay at the moment.

!!!EVERYBODY TAKE NOTES!!! This is how you do subscription. They nailed not just the synth itself, but also the sales aspect of it.

And also if you bump into theese guys at a convention, they're awesome to talk to. :) My fav developer at the moment.