AW: Taking VSTs out on the road

["Rainer Straschill" <moinsound@googlemail.com>]

> another reason...if you are looking for real instruments 
> sounds like piano, trumpets. Especially piano's are a good 
> example of how technology has improved.

If I remember correctly, Phil was looking for "synth sounds" (meaning
"synthetic", not emulations of acoustic instruments) and drums/world
percussion. The E-mu series (which wasn't my recommendation btw) is fine 
for
the synth stuff due to the flexibility of its engine. And I daresay that
even drums and world percussion sound fine if e.g. a Proteus 2000 is
expanded with the Protean Drums and World Expedition soundsets.
Even though those are only 32MB for everything together, sound editors were
quite skillful in these days when it came to squeeze the most out of a very
limited amount of memory available, making use of the possibilities of the
engine (e.g. complex envelopes, loops - hey, we even to this thread
on-topic! ;))
 
> Anyway, that's what I mean with "dated", not saying that 
> every synth has to sound like the real deal which was clearly 
> THE trend in the 80's and 90's. Once the VA's and analog 

Then again, sometimes the cheap copy of a real instrument by a synth 
becomes
a kind of "real deal" by itself. Examples are the DX7 electric piano (still
very much in use e.g. in hiphop jazz) and the heavily compressed grand 
piano
of the M1 (the standard piano sound for house).