I'm actually not assured that soft synths reaches toward the posibilities af hard synths. There was a little discussion between ED and me about this theme in another thread. Do you remember, ED?
I remember that ED and I agreed in that point that it would be a good idea to combinate this two elements in studio ambiances.
You need a KBcontroller for your soft synths? What about using a real synth with a weighted keyboard doing this job? You can expand your posibilities if you check out for a synth with an onboard sampling option. This will give you the ability to re-sample your sounds from one machine to the other.
IMHO at the and you will see that soft synths and hard synths aren't really different. For example: I'm using the Kurzweil's 'old' K2000RS with - the name reveals it - an onboard sampler. This sampler creates '.WAV' files. Your PC is also working with this file type.
Where is the difference? They both need AD-/DA-converters with high quality. My hard synth does it have! But my sound card...? Better use an high quality audio card...

To avoid latency under Windows OSs you still need a standard called ASIOdirect.
1. make sure that you don't use a mainboard with VIA's chip set which won't support the PCI interface in that way it used to be
2. make sure that you use an audio card which also supports ASIOdirect

The only software for this job that I know is Steinberg's Cubase (MX or SX). This program provides the advantage that it is available for Mac OS too (many professional studios are using Mac OS instead of Windows). So you can interact with them.

EDIT: Cubase is a sequenzer software. For this program it makes no difference wether you're controlling a soft or a hard synth. And if this won't be enough you can mix down and record all external sounds and wave tracks as one - a hifi stereo wave track. This will longing for burning them down on CDs.
Hey, isn't it your own label?

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Greetings from Frankfurt (Germany),
Sheriff ;-)

[This message has been edited by Sheriff (edited 03-20-2005).]