Kurzweil has some of the best sounds on the market, and they have a single-rack-space module, the PC2r, which has room for two expansion modules inside.
Right now they are shipping with the Orchestral Rom installed, which also allows the unit to be put into General Midi mode for ease of use with various programs.
The patches are gorgeous, the unit is very easy to work with, and takes up very little space out on a gig.
It runs $960 or so at www.sweetwater.com -- I just got one a few weeks ago, and it puts all the soft-synths I have heard to shame, plus there is absolutely no latency involved and as a hardware unit it is not prone to the glitches that computers can sometimes get.
You can power it with a notebook if you want to, or you can put your midi files on a palm pilot and use the wonderful little application IttyMidi to power the PC2r.
Softsynths are fine as far as they go, and the potential is there for true greatness, but that greatness often comes at a cost in programming time and in patch loading time.
For my money (and I do have the Reality soft-synth on my PC) the hardware route is the better route to go.
Darcy James Argue wrote:
Hmm...
I've been following the soft synth thread with interest because I've been thinking of getting a decent sound module for my getting-long-in-the-tooth MIDI keyboard. But I gather from the comments here that getting an outboard box is no longer a good way to go -- that even for live performances, I'm better off using the keyboard to trigger a laptop running a soft synth. (I have to say, I'm a little skeptical about that. Also, I don't own a laptop yet, though I'm planning on getting one soon.)
My needs are limited. I just want a really good acoustic piano sample and a really good Rhodes sample. That's it. I don't care about orchestral instruments or anything else (though I suppose a borderline acceptable string ensemble patch would be okay -- not a deal-breaker, though). I don't care about sequencing or any of that stuff. I just want a low-hassle way of triggering the samples from my MIDI keyboard in real time, and it has to work with OS X. I would also want it to work with Finale MIDI playback.
Any suggestions? Is a soft synth really the way to go for this, or would an outboard sound module be less of a hassle? *Are* there any outboard sound modules that match soft synths in terms of quality? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
- Darcy
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