So, Pier, how are you getting on with Falcon? First thoughts in comparison to Zebra?
TL;DR: I'm having a love hate relationship with it. The sonic character and sound design capabilities are mind blowing but I just hate using it.
Here's my long review/rant if anyone is interested...
I won't comment on the included presets. In general I find them very meh but, to be fair, I've only skimmed very few presets superficially.
The good
The sound reminds me a lot of Vital. Very clean and precise even when adding distortion, saturation, etc. This isn't a criticism. Each synth has its own sound, but if one is looking for analog mojo it's not there or, at least, very hard to find.
My favorite part of Falcon are definitely the effects. Not only in the quality but also the huge variety. For example, having a convolution processor right inside Falcon opens up so many sonic possibilities. I think PhasePlant is the only other synth that comes close to this.
The DSP performance has been excellent on my desktop PC with a Ryzen 3700X. Also it opens up super fast which is very impressive.
The bad
The sound design potential is really mind blowing for a single instrument, or rather an environment. But this is the thing, as an environment for experimentation, the usability of Falcon is really bad.
If you have a clear and precise idea of what you want to accomplish, it's not horrible. But, once you want to start tweaking all this system of layers/effects/etc you've created, everything takes just too many steps. Even after you've understood the weird UX patterns UVI has in place, it's so clunky and inefficient. I feel like UVI wants to waste my time on purpose.
I could point to dozens of examples but here's just one: you're doing your thing on some layer and now you want to reorder the effects of some other layer. The obvious solution would be to just reorder the effects in the tree view, but that doesn't work. So, you double click on the effect in the tree view, navigate to a different section, maybe scroll, click drag to reorder the effects... and then you have to go back to where you were which, again, takes a number of clicks and scrolling. Something trivial that could be solved with a single click and drag becomes a tedious ordeal that takes a dozen clicks.
Then there are UI widgets which are just bad. The MSEGs for example are the worst I've ever used, in any audio product. Or just incomprehensible stuff like why doesn't the analog oscillator have a semitones setting?
Other than usability issues, I've found many UI bugs when using it on a 4K monitor. Plenty of stuff not rendering at the proper scale. Here's just one:
Also, the performance of the UI when running it at hiDPI in 4K is very poor. Some knobs take almost 1 second to update after moving them quickly... yeah that bad. This doesn't affect the sound in any way though.
Falcon's sweet spot
First, Falcon is also the only platform in the market that gives you access to the IRCAM algos. So if you want to experiment with that, just go with Falcon.
I think Falcon really shines as a platform for distributing hybrid content (samples + synth). The only other worthwhile competitor is Omnisphere, but Spectrasonics hasn't opened up multisamples to its users (yet).
As a pure synth my opinion is that there are better options out there. Zebra, Dune, PhasePlant, Rapid, or Omnisphere are extremely capable and will cover most (not all) of what Falcon does. If Falcon is worth it for the extra say 10-20% is very subjective. For me, personally, it's not worth it. I'd rather have a more limited product that I actually enjoy using.
As a sampler/rompler Falcon is definitely more powerful than Kontakt. But Kontakt is so much more popular. Honestly, I don't have a strong opinion on this, but I feel if someone had to decide on which platform to invest (as a user or sound designer) Kontakt would be a better option.
As a sound design experimentation playground I would recommend Bitwig rather than Falcon. Not only it does provide all the capabilities Falcon has (with the exception of the IRCAM stuff) but it's lightyears ahead in terms of usability and modern user experience. Even just using Bitwig's vanilla devices. Of course, since Bitwig is a full blown DAW, you can use any third party plugin. Eg: layer a Spitfire cello with Zebra, process that with FabFilter Saturn, and save that as a preset. The issue with Bitwig is really distribution. It would probably make more sense to just render everything to samples and distribute in Kontakt, EXS24, Hise, Sforzando, etc.
Conclusion
I would love to love Falcon, but you've probably guessed by now Falcon is not for me.
The most astonishing thing, to me at least, is how blind UVI seems to be to their own product.
Falcon is not an abandoned product from 20 years ago. UVI keeps investing dev effort by adding more features. But Falcon already has more features than Zebra, Kontakt, and Omnisphere
combined. I'm 100% certain the fundamental usability issues are the reason it's not more popular. Not the lack of features.
Of course one could argue that I have extremely low tolerance for bad usability, which is absolutely true, but the problems I've described here are objective.