That's what I meant as I've written: "Virtual synthesises are not really equal to real sysnthesises with analogic oscillators." ;-)
The fact is that all oscillators built in the past had their own characteristics. The same fact is true for the LFOs, AMPs, FXs, etc.
V.S.T. tries to emulate all those hardware in all characteristics. Unfortunality there are really some physical barriers to do so. The result is an engine which sounds 'not really equal', 'nearly the origin', 'pretty good' or something like that. Otherwise you'll get new 'colours' so why not? ;-)


It's a shame but I don't know the most synths you're enumerating (except DX7). But I've readed between your lines that you're using a lot of soft synths. I guess that soft synths are less expensive than hard synths? ;-)

Oh...by the way...the Atari Falcon 030 doesn't really make me feeling limited because of its MFP. This little chip gave the Atari a special interupt for the midi controller on board. This gave many professional studios in Germany the reason to keep on 'tracking' with their Falcons. Furthermore there are newer TOS systems with higher efficient CPUs (but that's another story). ;-)
Other (modern) systems have no special midi interupt. So they need a software driver to translate the PCI (or any other) interupt into a midi interupt. The latency for example in PC systems is created by the very high bus traffic developed by win32. This problem had exist for a long time until some manufacturers created a new standard in cooperation with MS - ASIOdirect! Authoritatively participated in creating the new standard was the Cubase's developer Steinberg. An assistant of Steinberg personally told me that ASIOdirect domineers the most backing functions of win32 systems. This means that you'll need an audio card which supports ASIOdirect and any software (for example Cubase) which also supports ASIOdirect. That's imho the only way to use an external keyboard without latency under win32. By the way, this standard isn't used under Mac OS.
Unfortunality another problem appeared - the mainboard's chip set. The most PC mainboards today use the VIA chip set. It emerged that this chip set doesn't fully support the PCI bridge. So the ASIOdirect doesn't work correctly.
Win32, the never ending story... ;-)

How many soft synths could be used at the same time? Every soft synth program has its own source code size which is using RAM. Every sound texture created or used by those programs also uses RAM. So it isn't easy to say how many synths.
A music dealer told me that 512 MB were enough for parallel running of 3 soft synths. (which not automatically means that 1 GB affords capacity for only 6 synths). But what would you do with so many synths? You're not making live music, are you? ;-)


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Greetings from Frankfurt (Germany),
Sheriff ;-)