tlaskows wrote:Diva is pretty much the same as Scope in terms of sound quality, but it likes to eat all my cores.
Diva is indeed good, but yeah, it can be hungry. The XILS labs synths are also very good, IMO. I ended up buying a KingKORG to supplement my VST instruments. It's good but the build quality isn't the best and when I had to downsize to fit into a smaller space, it got the axe. The XITE-1 was my solution for a replacement.
I don't have it yet, but I've pretty much exhausted every demo I could find on the internet and my impression is that the XITE-1 stock instruments do sound a bit better to my ears than Diva and the KingKORG. Frankly, I listened to a bunch of Prophet 6 demos and I kind of thought the Profit 5 sounded as good to me than an actual dyed-in-the-wool analog! Of course, if I had the two together in a room I might change my mind, but I'm not that worried about that. I'm more interested in things it can do that an actual analog can't do, like combine VA with purely digital synthesis. The thing I liked about the KingKORG and Prophet 12 were the places where digital oscs met analog (and modeled analog) filters and effects.
Of course, there are plug ins like Zebra (and Zebra HZ) and Reaktor for those types of things as well, but I still get the idea that the Scope instruments have a depth and richness to their sound that the plug ins strain to get. Maybe I'll change my mind about that too, but having those quality sounds without having to look at my CPU meter will be nice.
