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1) All of that is subjective opinion.
2) You can bass anything up by running it through a valve amp or a valve simulator. Ive played on a Roland Juno 106 and yeah - its bassy from the word go but I genuinely think, oscillator waveforms and filter design aside, you could get a similar kind of presence with a well designed softsynth and a valve amp.
Also take note that doing that will make it a little bit harder for these instruments to 'fit' in your tunes - but thats to be expected in digital recording where there is a finite limit to the pre and post gain that can be applied to a signal or frequency range via an EQ or high Q filter.
3) It amazes me that anyone can collectivise *all* softsynths and say all of them don't sound as 'warm' or as 'fat' as hardware VAs when there is no common concensus on what these terms even mean.
4) Say all of that again when you have played G-Media impOSCar. It sounds more analogue than my Virus B and the raw oscillators absolutely shred. It saturates more realistically than my Virus B. The filter sounds more like an analogue filter than my Virus B. If I wanted to make convincing monophonic analogue noises I will use impOSCar over my Virus B any day of the week.
5) If you record via analogue ins, the signal goes through an additional A/D conversion stage. If you have shitty convertors like on pretty much every soundcard below an 828mkII then I just don't get why you would want to do this with any kind of regularity. Since the result is going to be mixed digitally anyway, it makes more sense to keep everything on the digital side if you can help it. Unless you have fucking spectacular convertors like, I dunno - an Apogee Rosetta 200 or something.
Same applies for people running outboard gear on shit convertors and Cubase - WHY?!
I can understand if its real analogue and the A/D conversion is necessary but think about it - taking a digital VA. converting it to analogue so you can send it via an analogue output into a soundcard input which converts it back to digital. Which then converts it back to analogue for real time monitoring.
At this point in time hardware VAs have a better specification than software VAs because it would take too many CPU cycles to replicate them exactly. And nobody likes adding a softsynth and it using 60% CPU load straight away. But as CPUs get faster we will start to see more softsynths in line with the specification of the average hardware VA and then I really see no point for external virtual analogue except for the user interface.
6) Software and hardware have completely different workflow. I admit I tend to prefer hardware in this respect. More hands on. The layout is individual on each synth and the layout is designed in a way which makes programming that synth fast and easy. Also, its easier to visualise the signal chain with loads of hardware as you have to rig it all up and you get a better idea of what the signal is going through. Software though requires no setup and it cannot ever fail (e.g. due to a kinked wire or a faulty module). Software is idiot proof.
Last edited by Derivative on Aug-28-2006 at 10:01
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