Well I got a chance to demo the Powercores Virus last evening, a tedious demo to say the least, after like 2 mins the sound turns off and you have to reload the plug if you want to try it again, unfortunately its tedious because the system they have used for the preset list is you have to file thru patches via a patch menu, similar to Arturias modular.
As for sound, it does sound pretty great, fat and warm and the 1st stock patch is a very lush evolving pad which sounds great could easily see using it all over the place, certainly different sounding that the CW stuff though, this I thought was a bit odd, I was figuring they would have similar tonalities, but this was not the case. It is a bit difficult to compare though since devices like minimax use upsampling.
From the 100 presets I thumbed thru, I could say this device sounds very very good and is guaranteed to be a top seller for the platform, it really did have an analog sound, I am guessing this was due to motorola DSP shared in the actual unit. I didnt get a ton of time to thumb around in the different modulation pages and stuff, but in my short time of testing the filters sounded great and the arp lines were very detailed, some how they managed to replicate the virus sound, complex textures and evolving pads in a DSP synth.
I dont own a real virus but I have played with plenty of them in the shops and at other studios, and I can say I think this synth captures the sound quite well, you really get the virus feel from the arp style sounds, and of course they included a couple standard nuskool techno bases and some percussion sounds.
On a side note, the percussion sounds were pretty great, I dont recall a kick but some how they were able to create some nice sounding snares. I wonder what type of programing they used for this device?
From my understanding, the Powercore version is able to access (no pun intended) the entire 4k+ library of user made patches, this should be enough to give ANY one a large enough sound set to help generate your own or find exactly what your looking for.
As far as the effects, I have to say, they sounded fantastic, I am sure they just used the TC code for the built in effects, such as classicverb/chorus/delay. I have to admit I was a bit curious as to what this device would sound like since there Powercore 001 stock synth is an absolute waste of code and 90% unusable.
I dont think this device will replace any CW devices since it has a different sound, but its nice to have more colors in the pallet
Cheers!
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Basic Pitch on 2004-04-16 12:41 ]</font>
Sir 
