Vanguard

I have much the same view of Vanguard as mentioned in the other reviews. It really is pretty good value, it's capable of a fair bit of variation in sound with a good set of edit parameters. It fills it's own niche in much the same way JunoX2 did. It's not a VSTi Virus and it never was meant to be and it's not advertised as such whatever rubbish you may have read about it. It's aimed pretty well squarely at the dance/trance crew and as such it does its job extremely well. If you want those hard edged or very full-sounding stabs, hoover type sounds etc then this is the synth for you. I can't think of any other synth I own that does hoovers galore straight out of the box. I don't always make that type of music, but when I do I go straight to Vanguard. It's a direct successor to JunoX2 but it adds a whole heap of things that you couldn't do with JunoX2. For example it's more capable of getting heavier bass, you can modulate the sound a whole lot more, it has very useful FX such as the trance gate. The gating is not done by many other VSTis and it works seamlessly. If you make that specific style of dance, then the trancegate is an invaluable tool. It has a very impressive set of filters (more than on the JunoX2) which can produce some very hard and nasty sounds. But you also can make softer more subtle sounds with it - easy for pads and most types of leads. Not everyone's cup of tea, but if you're a dance-head, you definitely should try out Vanguard - it was made for you.

CPU - a small hit and won't overload even a modest PC while playing chords.

VFM - lots of good presets that show off what you can do with the synth. All useable musically, so if you're not into patching then you're off and running straight away. You can spend far more for dance synths that won't sound much better than Vanguard.

Support - I've had no issues with it recently. Very good support. At first release I couldn't get mine to load (it was a Win98 issue it seems) but that was fixed pretty quickly by ReFX as usual. ReFX have high points for responding to problems. Now it is rock solid in my system. I'm not aware of any other issues that haven't been fixed equally quickly. You will get far more support from ReFX than most of the big developers out there.

GUI - not at all difficult. Everything is laid out logically and it's pleasing to the eye to work with.

Features - already mentioned a few but here are more.
3LFOs with various destinations.
Lots of options with detuning and PWMing to really thicken up sounds.
3 Osc.
Gating FX for rhythmical pads etc.
Big set of osc choices and filter choices. The filters are the real strong point - all the usual LPF, BPF, HPF etc, but quite a few distortion filters combined with the usual to give you a very hard edge to the sound. Formant filter, comb etc.

Vanguard does a wide range of sounds specifically aimed at dance - ReFX gained a following precisely because they target their plugins to a specific audience.Read Review