alt Hacker News> I’ve been wanting a generic-looking, wood-grained “tablet display” covered with a dozen PHYSICAL faders, sliders, and knobs that you can leave permanently hooked up to a DAW that interfaces with virtual synths for over a decade now!
Just one of several. These have existed for at least two decades, save for "dynamically update all the text around each dial", which has a variety of complications that I won't go into here.
Yeah I should have clarified - I have plenty of generic MIDI controllers. The special sauce is reflecting the "VST" rendering/presentation of its own sliders/dials onto physical ones.
This means not having to look up and down constantly between your computer monitor and the physical hardware since the knobs/dials each have small screens/displays are 1:1 matches (so Frequency Range, Sub Audio, Clamping Point, Oscillator Frequency, etc).
VSTs are rather inscrutable and I think it would be difficult to design in an agnostic way that played nicely out-of-the box with the majority of them. Doesn't stop me from lusting over the possibility though.