Nice collection of virtuals there. I like Chainer as well. it's one excellent host that is stable as a rock.

A local musician friend has Bandstand and my experiences with it were not very good. It took too long to load patches for it ( he has a very fast computer ) to be useful to me, and in the end he and I both agreed that it didn't sound a whole lot better than the freeware SGM180 soundfont that we A/B'd it against, in spite of having approx 10 times as much sample rom.

He just got Hypersonic 2 as well, dongle and all, and I went again to his place to demo it. I liked what I heard. I don't necessarily think the GM patches were superior to Bandstand's, but they loaded much faster. Also, for me, most of the Non GM voices were at least on par with their counterparts in my Motif ES, and in quite a few cases I liked them better.

I like the NI stuff as well. Although I'm tempted to try Arturia's Prophet, my experiences with their Moog and CSV80 emulations leaves me thinking I probably am better off sticking with the Pro 53. The Arturia emulations I mention sound wonderful, but they also suck up a ton of CPU and don't always respond the way they are supposed to inside of some of my hosts.

Absynth totally rocks, and in my mind covers much of the same ground as the Roland V synth, but with more patches that can actually sit well in a mix. B4 is for me better than having the real thing, mainly because it plays so well out of my four and a half pound laptop.

FM7 does the old yamaha DX7 very well, ( you can load the old hardware patch setups into it ) and it also goes beyond it. I'd probably get it if I didn't already have Sytrus, Image Line's FM based soft synth.

In addition to these my favs are : Korg legacy collection including the Wavestation, Polysix, and M1. Finally I have an M1 that works every time I fire it up, unlike my original hardware version. I doubt anyone could ever tell the difference in sound. The Poly six emulation is also dead on ( I had a Polysix as well ). I never had a Wavestation, but man it just rocks in software.

I also like the Plugsound Fretted, drum and keyboard modules.

My favorite analog emulator is still RGC Audio's Pentagon, although Imposocar, which goes after a different sound, is right up there as well.

Some great freewares are out there too: Minimogue VA sounds fat and even has a variable control to let you emulate the oscillator drift that a FReal Mini Moog would produce.

Synth 1 is an absolute killer freebie, based somewhat on a Nord Lead but also capable of sounds you'd likely never get from a Nord.

AJ