To me the keyboard was the big winner. It feels and plays so nice. If it weren't for the money I would have gotten the big Cobalt8 just for the keyboard.
However a synth is about its sound and it is so clear and transparent I can not combine it with my other sounds. This is very personal and I am not saying that the Cobalt8 is bad sounding. I, however, need to bring down the filter at least 40% to have a somewhat pleasing sound to my ear. Next to that all presets are drowning in extreme stereo spread, delay and reverb... bass, bell, pad or string.. to my ears they all started to sound the same. They all have that glassy sound. All the sounds are there but I can not emotionally relate to them.
When I checked the filter (clean with lots of resonance) I could hear the steps jumping from one position to the next so obvious I knew this would not be the synth for me. In this day and age it should have a much better resolution.
When I wanted to set lfo from 0 to 2, I carefully turned the knob but position remained 0 so I gave it a little push and it jumped to 5. Then turned the knob backwards to 1 to 6.. it took me a while before I got it where I wanted. Then I waited for a long time to hear the effect but the lfo was simply not running yet when set to 02. You need to set lfo speed at least at 5 or so before it starts running. Specially with digital I like to have a precision and this annoyed me.
The volume knob is very loose and when adjusting the filters or effects I could touch the volume knob by mistake making a jump up or down in volume which should never happen so easy. Live this could be a disaster.
The filter is boring. This is a big issue for me. It says 'toem' no 'tjoem'
Limitations in an instrument can work out inspiring but having a digital synth I feel there must be more possible with some sort of modulation matrix. Why not exploit the strengths of this machine?
I really wanted to like this one. I think if you play presets or self created sounds as they are you can be happily in love with this synth. But if you want to adjust sounds in realtime while playing you bump onto little and bigger issues. When I listen to recordings I did with the Cobalt I could' t help but listen to a vst. A vst built into a wonderful keyboard.
