It’s funny because a lot of those synths are considered best in class..
Massive was the first widely popular wavetable synth and was considered quite usable.. until Serum came out. I personally think despite the knobs, it’s one of easiest to use and understand synths out there. It shows you visually how the filters, wave tables, and various parameters are being modulated in real time, and you can easily add new modulations and customize the LFOs to whatever shape you want.
Sylenth was and still is a go to subtractive synth, and Spire is considered a spiritual successor to it..
Diva itself is a virtual analog synth intended to accurately replicate the sound of actual hardware synths, so it of all the synths pictured there should look like them.
I suppose that maybe I’m just used to the way softsynths look and feel, but I see nothing inherently wrong with using knobs and a metallic look. The main problem I have is when synths give you no indication as to how things are being modulated in real time, which is why Serum is my favorite synth - it does a fantastic job of that, knobs or not
Yes, they're all popular and well-regarded. And, even though I've used real synths for decades, I don't generally find the UI on these synths to be a nice experience. Some are better than others, but they're nearly all much harder to read than a UI that adheres to OS UI guidelines would be. Most are not scalable, and so are literally unusable for me (my eyesight isn't what it used to be, even with corrective lenses, and it's never been great), unless I change the resolution of my display. Even at 1080p many are too small on my 15" laptop, and I usually run at and prefer to run at 4k.
The type used is often abysmal. Pretending to be a squinty little LCD panel, for example, when we have infinite pixels is just plain stupid. The only reason old synths had those little panels was because big panels were expensive and graphical displays (CRTs) were too big to put into a keyboard form factor. It makes no sense to use the beautiful displays we have today and use them to reproduce all the compromises of a former era, but it is almost universal. Nearly all of the most popular VSTs impose these kinds of ugly restrictions on their UI.
In short: A lot of VSTs are barely legible, ugly, utterly inaccessible, and just all around stubbornly wrong on usability for the sake of looking "cool".
There's nostalgia for a simpler time, which I understand, and then there's the sadistic UI abuses found in many VST plugins (and audio software in general), which I abhor.
Massive was the first widely popular wavetable synth and was considered quite usable.. until Serum came out. I personally think despite the knobs, it’s one of easiest to use and understand synths out there. It shows you visually how the filters, wave tables, and various parameters are being modulated in real time, and you can easily add new modulations and customize the LFOs to whatever shape you want.
Sylenth was and still is a go to subtractive synth, and Spire is considered a spiritual successor to it..
Diva itself is a virtual analog synth intended to accurately replicate the sound of actual hardware synths, so it of all the synths pictured there should look like them.
I suppose that maybe I’m just used to the way softsynths look and feel, but I see nothing inherently wrong with using knobs and a metallic look. The main problem I have is when synths give you no indication as to how things are being modulated in real time, which is why Serum is my favorite synth - it does a fantastic job of that, knobs or not