Squeak,

I would agree that for me, of the big "3" the Motif series has the weakest synth sounds. I would even rate the PA80 better than the my ES in this area.

Remember though, we're talking samples in the first place. Donny said " synths are synths, but really, you can run with that and say "workstations are workstations, not synths". Although sample based synths allow us to create many new synth sounds that were not possible in analog machines, the digital filters used in most of the current workstations are quite limited, and don't seem to stack up well against the analog filtering schemes of yesteryear.

Then again, these workstations are not trying to emulate a pure synth. I think they are trying to offer an "all in one" solution instead, a sort of hardware sample based DAW / Instrument.

You can get very close with digital filters, as witnessed by some of today's vitual analogs, but often you don't get the exact sounds in part at least because digital filters don't drift like the older analogs did. There are however, newer software synths that have a variable drift function. Even one of the freeware minimoogs has it, and with just a hair of drift applied it really does remind me of the real thing.

The cure for the Motif series is an easy one though. I added an analog modeling AN150 plug in that makes it a vitual AN1X or AN200. These were hardware Yamaha Analog modeled synths that did a very faithful Prophet 5 emulation.

AJ