that's the normalization i mentioned. it makes your rating meaningless to anyone but yourself.

Heh, this is it! Something like a "one-year-on" follow-up would be quite enlightening. Or "how soon did it end up on the market place after getting an ecstatic 10?".

I only wrote one review here, and now, about a year later, I've noticed that I hardly use the synth I reviewed (and gave high marks to). It's Largo, and there's a single reason for that: the laggy interface. I still like it, and stand by what I wrote, but working with it annoys me in a very small but significant way, so that I almost never call it up.

There's some very thoughtful posts in here, thanks for that. My overall impression is that the current system is not as good as the old one, and that words are more important than numbers. As Lotuzia mentioned, we can review the reviewers here, but I'm not really a fan of the anonymous one-click love/hate button. It's like: "how dare you pissant scoundrel give my favourite synth a 9?? You mock me, so here's some hate for you!" Adding the possibility of a discussion was a good idea, but it's rarely used, except to point out glaring faults in a review.

"embarrassing" does not quite state the state of how many times I've bought/loved and "oooooo'ed" on teh kvrs and then sold.

It's hard being addicted

Yep, this is very true.

I can give a score of 9 to sound and 5 to interface and people will get a better picture than an 8 overall...

A single score out of ten is just way too arbitrary....

Would be great if this system could be changed back...

I felt like bumping it this morning (I'm in a raised-finger mood). I also wish to applaud lingyai for tossing a brave and well-explicated 4 into the happy bubble bath that is the slew of 10s. Oh, and bduffy's nice and balanced review was a highlight, as well.

It deserves 10/10 for sure. Of course there will be better synths than Diva, but that's irrelevant- it's good now, and does something unique.

Ihmo ideally ratings would automatically drop over time, e.g. a 10/10 rating would slowly reduce to 8/10 in five years or so. This would account for the constant improvement of plugins. A 10/10 rating that was given ten years ago is probably rarely justified by today's standards.

Richard

I did like the old ratings system. Much more encompassing. Especially Value for your money. Oh course it's all opinions.
I give this thread a 10.

Well, I could never even consider making a review there as I never use presets and thus can't rate them (might be just as well, perhaps the KVR community has been spared that way).. That is a minor flaw though, this is worse... A system where one could choose not to rate some sections would be perfect, IMO. If possible it should show clearly when one looks at the review, a darker or paler or more greyish hue for sections not considered.

Was there any section for CPU hit there? I think that should be considered as well, even though it would lower the ratings on almost everything but Audjoo Helix... It's definetely relevant when considering which plugs to get.

Good point but I think computers are so varied it would be meaningless. The hit I take on my dual core with 2GB RAM is going to be a lot different from someone who has a quad core. I saw this firsthand when I got the dual core and stuff that had been maxing at 50% CPU went down to 20.

MAybe it could be a requiref field in the Performance review section to put down your machine specs? I do think it help0s someone understand the reviewer's comments though, I would rate some plugins extremely high based on features and sound, but would have to give them some sort of hit for CPU/RAM use. As a reader of reviews I would also find it helpful.

It really was a tough call, as the underlying instrument sound (Pianissimo) is just stonkingly great, IMHO ... easily my favourite for piano lessons, noodling and low-RAM projects involving natural sounding piano. I've tried Pianoteq, which does sound great, but it sounds like it's on a stage and you're in the audience... whereas Pianissimo sounds like you're sitting at it. But...the all-but-crippling bug I mentioned, once discovered, was heart-breaking... like catching your firtborn in their first lie...

I've updated my reviews and lowered their scores to leave room for higher scoring synths in future reviews and I've also added some notes with some after thoughts.

What if you load the project with the FX offline, then simply turn Piannisimo online before the others? I know Reaper has a "recovery mode" which opens the project with all tracks offline. Do other hosts have this feature?

Diva's an 8.5, everything else, no better than 6. You want criticism, I've got it in spades.

BTW: I really like Diva, but, no synth is a 10, and it's only on REV 1.1, so it can't even be a 9...yet.


Reaktor is also an 8.5, but only scores a 6.5 on sound.

I don't like anything else...much.