Output vs Spectrasonics

[Citrixx]

Hello,
as a freshman in producing electronic music, i'm not quite sure if i should buy
the Output-VST-bundle offer with 60% discount (consisting of 8 engines and 18 expansions) or Omnisphere 2 from Spectrasonics. It seems that Output focuses on creative inputs for musicians with unusual sounds while Spectrasonics is a reference in music-instrument-sounds, right? Prices for the mentioned products are almost comparable, but i am not sure if this bundle from output does fit my idea of music making (electronic music e.g. kruder&dorfmeister or more into minimal techno). It seems that Omnisphere has a palette of good quality sounds in order to make music like an orchestra as long as you can play this instruments as good as a e.g. pianist!?

What would you recommend in order to create music out of ideas you get from the listened stuff? The price/performance-ratio would also be interesting to know - output bundle has almost the same price as omnisphere 2. Thanks for your advise.

P.S. I am using FL Studio

[anomandaris1]

People are really impressed by shiny GUIs and marketing campaigns without actually researching the instruments...

Tell us more what type of music you want to make. I doubt that any of these two is actually for you (unless you are in the film or video game scoring/ambient music ).

Omnisphere is no way reference in "music-instrument-sounds" - the guy behind it is a master sound designer and it is filled with some of his past sample libraries (dated compared to anything avaliable for Kontakt), many sampled synth sounds and some synthesis and fx processors, but it can't stand to any modern specialized synth or fx processor. But it has TONS of presets (most of them are unusable without removing the fx like reverb, but they sound impressive...) If you are looking for a quality selection of more traditional instruments, you won't find them (yet, maybe they will announce brass/strings/whatever expansions at some point) in Omnisphere (there are some, but like I said, even their expansions like Keyscape or Trilian are worse than Kontakt's offerings, but still a good price for the money/size, if you don't need hyperdetailed sampling libraries).
Don't get me wrong, you can still make music with it, but (imo) it's worth it only because of all the presets (if you are looking for this type of sound). If you are looking for creating original sounds, there are probably better instruments.
Output - looks overpiced, I wouldn't get anything out of them (maybe only Exhale, if I need to make such sound and I'm too lazy to create my own) - synthy "orchestral" sounds can be made in most synths, just slap a good reverb on them...

[Elektronisch]

Those so called "engines" are just Kontakt player instruments. They have bigger memory footprint then Omnisphere meaning more resource usage. Omnisphere is way more versitile, its a synth+sample player meaning its a hybrid synth. It has a great variety of sounds.

Output does look and sound great in general, but marketing and presentation is actually bigger then what instruments offer. Those instruments are focused to a particular sound and because they are Kontakt based it means they are quite limited.

Id go with Omnisphere 2.5.

But its best for you to demo, check youtube ect.

[mgw38]

I have both. If you are doing minimal techno you will not be happy with the Output bundle. I love it but it is not really very suitable for that genre.

Omnisphere is considered by many to be the best synth on the market today. Imho the best allround synth. You can’t really go wrong with it and you would most certainly have fun with it, especially with all the expansions out there. But given you cite a very specific music taste something more specialized might give you a better bang for your buck.

[antic604]

as a freshman in producing electronic music

For now stick with what you have in FL + some free VST instruments & effects. Once you get more experience you'll know if and which one of those to get

[Gamma-UT]

Omnisphere is overkill for K&D or minimal. And Output too much epic/trailer music. A half-decent sampler (and I assume FLS has one of those) and you're good to go. A lot of Omni presets are going to sound way too synthetic/treated for early K&D - it doesn't have a lot of the bread-and-butter sounds that a classic rompler does.

[ATS]

Get Omnisphere. It's incredible. I have both of the things you are talking about and both are very good. But if just one Omnipshere by a good measure.

[Trancit]

I tried Omnisphere from time to time and I found about 5% of the presets more or less usefull but the other 95% was nothing but crap for me...
The most laughable part are the added so called EDM presets... perhaps their are suitable for the most heavy EBM/Industrial/whatever part.... even Synth1 got better EDM sounds than Omnisphere
TBH, Omnisphere is for me by far the Soundgenerator with the most ugly presets on this planet...
If you are deep into distortion/experimental/film fx (like i.e. horror movie) it might be a good choice, but for everything else it´s (for me) not worth at all...
Every decent synth nowadays blows the synth engine of Omnisphere out of the water and as already stated, there are not much bread and butter sounds in the sampled part...

I know, Omnisphere is hyped like crazy, but for me, I would not even use it for free (or perhaps a very little...)...

[Cinebient]

As usual you just will hear biased opinions.
So you should watch tons of you-tube videos, hear demo tracks and do more research.
F.e. i disagree with some things like i find Keyscape the best keys library ever.
But that is also my opinion just.
Hard to decide if you can‘t demo things for a certain time.
But i would choose Spectrasonics from these since Omnisphere is a great workstation with microtuning and lots of other performance modes which i miss in other tools.
But i would recommend just to use your stock tools inside your DAW of choice. These days most major DAW‘s give you a great start and then evolve from there.

[rod_zero]

For minimal you should start concentrating in synthesis so get an easy to use and good sounding synth, Omnisphere is a good synth but not exactly the best workflow to explore.

I would even suggest if you have 500 USD to spend to get a hardware synth with lots of controls that will be useful to learn synthesis hands on, some models I think could be useful to you:

Roland system 1m
Roland Boutique SH01a
Arturia Minibrute 2
Novation Bass Station
Korg monologue, minilogue
dreadbox erebus

In software I would recomend cheking out Serum, DIva, Hive, Massive, Arturia V collection...

Not that sample product as output ones couldn't be used but certainly not what I would recommend for a beginner at all, I think it is way more important to learn to use synths and you develop a sense of what can be done with synths vs samples.

[BBFG#]

I recommend steering clear of both of them.

Get HALion 6 instead.
Good bread & butter sounds, plus enough of the esoteric engines to dig into also.

Or like others have suggested, stick with your FL instruments for now.

[pdxindy]

Avoid both of them... Omnisphere is overrated. It's good if you you want to sound like a standard over produced soundtrack... otherwise there are better options out there...

[sureno]

Both are amazing in their own right, but for you, neither, for what you're doing,

massive
serum
Diva or minimoog v3 (Arturia)

for all your synthesis sounds and just get some good knowledge on fx usage

[EnochLight]

I bought Omnisphere 2; ended up selling it not even 4 months later. It's over-rated, IMHO. Ended up going with Output Arcade, because some of the content is mind blowing and I enjoy its interface 1000x more than Omnisphere.

I also had Exhale and Rev for a time, but ended up returning those and going with Arcade.

I have to agree with others, though - watch user videos on YouTube and see which product appeals more to your own productions. You're only going to get biased information here.