I don’t see any reference to anything arranger based in tapas’ post, it might help to have him detail what he’s trying to accomplish…

If he’s just looking for a few high quality sounds to flesh out an arranger performance, that’s one thing. But for starters he mentions it all being controlled from an RD2000, so not an arranger…

If he’s looking to do entire productions or live show layering of sounds, that puts a LOT more strain on a VSTi setup than one hand playing a solo over an arranger backing. Latency is always a trade off with polyphony, and many of the newer piano VSTi’s, with multiple mic positions and close and distant room ambiences can chew up a CPU pretty quickly triggering all those samples for each note, along with string resonance samples etc..

I find that sub 5ms latency is pretty much indistinguishable from hardware, but you start layering a TOTL piano plugin with a TOTL string and orchestral library, and achieving that latency live can be an issue, especially if you’re a bit sustain pedal happy..!

So, as in all things VSTi related, YMMV. So much depends on how you play, what you play and where (live or studio etc) that there’s no definitive answer.

How do you see yourself using all this, Tapas?