this is pretty random, but wanted to post.

spent part of the day doing a highly-subjective comparison of my current synth plugins.
i can hear in day-to-day use, the differences in their overall sounds, but thought it would be interesting to REALLY compare them. what i wanted to do was compare how they SOUNDED to me, so no scopes, graphs. as i said...subjective.

i have 5 synths i use regularly (3 mostly). so i created some 4-measure loops: a baseline, a keyboard, a pad, a lead.

then i copied these parts to each plugin's track.

then A-B'd each part. i also did this with a 4-bar chord pattern and each synth's 'init' patch.

the init patch thing was surprising; hard to tell much difference between them (until you go to upper octaves, then funny stuff happens). one plugin seemed weakest-sounding of the 5, but rules in preset quality (and quantity, for that matter).

to cut to the chase...the presets really matter (for me). my faves are really the plugins i have the biggest libraries for...
altho it is also true that the overall qualities of these plugins matters a lot (one is buzzier, one is smoother, one is rounder, etc...) each one of course has several of these qualities. but between the top 3, i feel i can get ANY kind of sound i need (and could break that down to 2 plugins if i had to).

the are a good number of great softsynths out there. i've been demoing like crazy, trying to 'grow' my arsenal.
am surprised tho at how few plugins i actually buy (and use).

just a fun experiment at the end of the day, and thought i'd share these observations.
sound really is EVERYTHING....