People complain about nearly everythingurosh wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 10:00 am Some really funny details:
1) all examples are drenched in FX, making comparisons nearly pointless
2) first example is Polyevolver. I guess OP doesn't know much about Evolver series, because it wouldn't bring it up for this particular topic.
3) funny thing about second example is that bazillion peoplez complained about Ultranova engine compared to older Supernova engine in Novation VAs, so one might think that HW companies "don't know how to do it". It sounds better then Polyevolver in these particular examples, but then again, I had K-Station for a while and was not impressed by it, but not nearly as unimpressed as with Nord Lead 3 which constantly pulled trick of magically disappearing in the mix. Nord did f**k that one up, so they reverted to older engine on NL4 iirc
4) I remember endless complains back then about "weedy sound" of AN-1X compared to "good" stuff like JP-8000
Don't have much experience with other pure VA plugins that OP mentioned, but Dune sure sounds stunning (if one turns FX off), however it doesn't sound like Virus. Most of these first generation VAs have their own particular sound, but are usually technically inferior to newer stuff. I like MS2000 engine, but oh boy, people were complaining about it's tone endlessly when it came out, and lot of complaints were not baseless.
Your points are surely vaild, I was also not sure what Polyevolver had to do with this thread as it had a lot of analog components. Also I agree that quite a big part of awesomeness of these demos come from the use of FX, clever patch programming and clever demo preparation (sequencing, automation, especially the Polyevolver one)
But I have a lot of experience with Virus and I know it well myself how it sounds in comparison with the plugins. I never owned the other synths mentioned in the thread (even those I mentioned myself ) so for me they are "awesome by association"