Fred, I’m not that familiar with the softsynths but I can tell you what my experiences have been. When I play a giga piano sound on my Mediastation, I hear absolutely no delay at all, but as Frank Rosenthal has stated less than 10 ms cannot be noticed by most people. (See Frank I do listen to you. Lol)

Though I have not performed any latency diagnostic tests on the Mediastation yet; I have played it solo, along with the arranger, along with mp3 files, and along with other live musicians (drums, bass, guitar) and I have not had any problems. If it is there, as we have been told it is with all keyboards, I can’t detect it. I have been playing it every weekend for over 3 months in live settings.

My system is optimized for music though, the Mediastation uses the Linux OS and the program that plays my giga sounds, Linux Sampler, runs in Linux as it’s native OS, so no problems there. When I play the Native Instruments B4 organ program however it is through WINE, the Windows emulation for Linux, and not the native OS. Still it performs perfectly as expected with no problems or latency that I can notice.

As to how many plug-ins it can handle at one time, I do not know. I have used a couple of plug-ins at one time, but never had a need for more. I think Domenik with Lionstracs told me one time he had around 12 plug-ins running and a video playing all from the Mediastation simultaneously. I will ask him for clarification.

As to the problem you had a few years ago, you mentioned that it was when Giga first came out. If the program you were using was Gigastudio or its predesessor Gigasampler, then your problem could have been insufficient processor speed.

I do not know much about these programs, but I have read that many professionals use dedicated Gigastudio PC’s to run that program exclusively; while using another connected PC to run their other sound and music programs. I think it was because these programs were very CPU intensive. Maybe someone with more knowledge on this issue will comment. Perhaps Kontakt 2 would be an option for the disk streaming samples. You could use Linux Sampler but then you would have to load Linux or an application like VM Ware.

I think that the Mediastation could definitely do the job for you, but there are also many computers out there that could as well. It all depends on what you are looking for. I can tell you that the sounds on good quality VST’s are exceptional .I agree with Frank’s post above, “The proof is in the pudding” as I have read about a lot of composers that are using orchestral vst’s to score films and other high profile projects.

I may not have answered many of your questions but I hope this helps some

Richard