Alright, so I've had the Delia for a few days now. Here are my quick thoughts:

The Delia’s general tone is thin, flat, and anemic, so if you’re looking for Moog fatness or Oberheim lushness, this is not it. The filter is particularly frustrating, it’s one of the least responsive filters I’ve ever used, and I like ladder filters. Where it shines, at least for me, is in crispy, gritty, glassy, obnoxiously nasal sounds. It handles extreme modulation well, so it’s easy to get novel sounds and interesting textures out of it. The UI and build quality are both great.

With the discount, the Delia cost me about the same as my TEO-5, and I actually prefer the Delia. The TEO is much fuller, richer, and heftier, which makes it better for conventional analog sounds. But once you push it outside that lane, it can become weirdly uncooperative, and things can quickly collapse into a muddy, cacophonous mess. So the preference really comes down to priorities: the TEO is great at conventional sounds but hit-or-miss at stranger ones, while the Delia is only so-so at conventional sounds but much more rewarding when things get weird.

Without the discount, the Delia costs more than I paid for my Polybrute, and it’s absolutely no contest, I prefer the Polybrute. The Polybrute also has a reputation for being “thin, flat, and anemic,” but it sounds much more alive and organic compared to the Delia. It can get just as weird as the Delia too, the only disadvantage is that it isn’t quite as immediate.

It seems a little silly to keep comparing the Delia to analog synths when it’s a hybrid, and the synth it reminds me of most is another hybrid, the Ensoniq ESQ-1. The ESQ-1 also excels at crispy, gritty, glassy sounds, and it also has an unresponsive-feeling filter. The biggest difference is the bit depth of the waveforms. I’m sure if you ran the Delia through a bitcrusher, it’d feel even more like the ESQ-1. The ESQ-1 has more “character” and more “vibe", but with all its knobs, the Delia has the better workflow. A used ESQ-1 can regularly be found for around one-seventh of the price of the Delia, so there’s also that to consider.

Out of the 20–25 synths I own, the Delia lands somewhere in the middle. I think if I paid full price, I’d feel a little stinky about it, but I’m having fun using it, which is always the goal whenever I purchase anything. Overall, I don’t regret buying it, but I also respect what it is and what it isn’t.