Hey, man, I've got an apartment bedroom. Have had for years. Billed over $50k in work in it last year. Don't knock bedrooms. You get to deduct them from your taxes.

So a little synth history:

In the beginning, there was analog and it was good. It was not all good - a lot of it was shit. My first real synth (other than the CZ-101 that my parents bought my sister, for some reason) was a Roland string machine, which is basically all those knobs and stuff you see replaced by resistors so that you've got very little creative possibility. Still, it was dope, and I learned to play Skinny Puppy's assimilate on it.

Analog gave way - SLOWLY - to digital in the form of the Yamaha DX-7, PPG Wave and Synclavier: FM, wavetable lookup and digital emulation/PWM/sampling respectively. From there, sample playback in the form of the M1 took over for a long time.

Sample playback slowly gave way to physical modeling (VL-1, Z1, Prophecy) while a few weird standouts (K5000S, Andromeda) pursued other technologies - but the writing was on the wall. Physical modeling is better done by a computer. As a result, every software synth you've ever seen is a physical modeler.

This brief and questionably utile discussion serves to make a point: most people who didn't grow up with keyboards and rack mixers don't really think about what kind of synthesizer they're buying. It matters, though. They're all physical modelers, but the question is: what are they modeling?

Massive models analog synthesis. Omnisphere models sample playback. Komplete is a sampler (kontakt) and, basically, eleven iterations of Reaktor, which is NI's only real product. Pretty much every synth NI has ever come out with is like the string machine I grew up with - it's an entirely open-ended physical modeler tweaked to be an FM synth (FM8) or an analog synth (Massive) or a wavetable synth (Absynth) or a sample player (kontakt) or an analog vocoder (Razor).

Here's the trick, though - Reaktor is a complicated beast. Few people know how to make it do what they want, and fewer can come up with an idea and go "I'm going to build a synth that sounds like this." That's what Reaktor does - it turns ideas into reality through a coarse Teutonic visual language. And the problem with complicated beasts is that in pursuit of getting them to make sounds, you forget they're supposed to make music.

Here's the Kyma users' group on Soundcloud. Note that they've left musicality somewhere far, far away. I've got a Kyma but I use it sparingly - not just because opening the hood on a "Sound" (how's that for a description for "preset") is a lot like opening a rift in the time-space continuum but because when your basic starting point is so radically divorced from what most people consider "music" you have a hard time getting back to the world.

So. The question is what you want to do, and what you want to do with it.

For analog, the Arturia V-Collection is unsurpassed. Their CS-80 is a CS-80. Their Minimoog is a Minimoog. Their Prophet VS is a Prophet VS. And they've got an all-in-one (Analog Lab) that's basically their version of Kore, which was pretty much the best idea Native Instruments ever had.

For breadth with character, Korg's Legacy Collection is a beautiful thing. I've owned 2 M1s and five Wavestations and not having a WS in my arsenal at the moment is deeply annoying. However, with Korg being owned by Steinberg, there will never be an AAX version of any of the Korg shit, which means I need to go through a wrapper, and I'm not quite there yet. That said, buy a Korg Microkey from Amazon and they'll give you the Legacy collection for free, so you end up paying half what you would if you up and bought it.

I own Komplete 7. I regularly use Absynth, Massive and Reaktor. Razor is, in all honesty, one of the most musically useful products they've ever come out with. I also bought Kinetic Metal and it's damn musical. It's musical for limited stuff, though. The number of synths you can get for Reaktor is pretty intimidating; I use several of them. Keep in mind, though - I'm mostly scoring Youtube videos and making weird noises for sound design.

Standalone stuff? I own Chipsounds by Plogue, but that's 'cuz I work on several projects where I need to rip off video game sounds from the '80s and Chipsounds is a video game emulator. I also own Izotope's Iris, which is basically a musical version of RX. Iris is essentially the logical conclusion of wavetable synthesis, where the wavetables are whatever audio files you have lying around, at whatever speed and through whatever spectral map you choose to use. However, it lends itself to a very specific type of music.

I'd probably own Alchemy if I didn't own a Kyma. But again - you're in that "dangerously non-musical" territory.