Esh, I agree with your assessment in terms of quality plus number of instruments per dollars cost for Colossus. There are even higher quality virtual acoustic instruments, e.g., the Garritan Stardivari Violin, etc. but you pay for it. I thought the person who provided the Colossus guitar mp3 did a very good job. I believe he is a guitarist and knows how to make these samples come alive.

Now, Bill I guess each to his own but none of the hardware based workstations or arranger keyboards come anywhere close to most of the Colossus, GPO or JABB Libraries. This is primarily due to the quality of the recordings (dynamic range, noise, velocity layers, longer or no looping and so on). In addition many of these instruments have many articulations many more than you would find on say a Yamaha Tyros 2 SAV. Now don't get me wrong the Tyros is way good enough for live performances it is just not the best sound available.