Okay, with only an hour of playtime, here are my initial thoughts - bear in mind I have never owned a Virus before, so the gushing which follows might not be what existing users of Virus synths want to hear about the TI - alas, it is all I can impart at this time:
Hardware
F*** me, what a monster! I have the TI Keyboard, which is a lot bigger than it looks in the pictures, and heavier! All metal chassis, which I am not used to at all having used a J-Pox8000 for so many years.
The semi-weighted Keyboard is nice to play on, and all the knobs feel robust.
Virus Control
I had trouble installing this software on a Dual 2.5 G5 for Logic 7.1. I had to install four times before it worked. The first pass it failed right at the end (it's about a 10 minute install time), the second time it claimed to have been successful, but the plugin wouldn't initialise properly once inside Logic. I installed again, and tried restarting the TI before launching Logic, still didn't work. Installed the fourth time and the installer suggested I log out of OS X to complete the installation before continuing, which I did - and still the plugin didn't work. So I restarted the Mac, and now it works.
So, although it's common practice to restart a machine after installing software, at no point did the installer prompt me to do so. Anyone with less patience might have been straight on the phone to support, so I suggest making it clearer in the installer that this stage is important.
Playing the synth with the plugin enabled resulted in horrible latency, until I took the I/O buffer size down to 32 (the lowest Logic supports), which is far lower than my EMI 2|6 required - so, I'm not sure what is going on there, perhaps there are more config settings I need to look at, but I'm useless with all of that stuff (any advice appreciated).
The Sound
As I say this is my first Virus, and despite being told countless times by a friend that I should sell my crusty JP8000 and get a Virus, I couldn't believe that it was _that_much_more_capable_ a synth.
However... just detuning the raw oscillators sounds amazingly powerful. I can program sounds on the JP - sounds that I am very proud of, so I will never sell it - but compared to the Virus it just seems... lightweight.
The TI reverb is lush, as are the distortion effects and filters... The overall sound of the synth is authentic. When I say authentic, I don't mean Analog sounding. I mean the sound feels alive - like it's not coming from a machine, but that it's alive in some fucked up universe of tech.
Happy me.
I'll post a track as soon as I can, but we're moving house in a week's time, which means the studio is being packed up very soon
pseudo
EDIT - My god how rude, I forgot to say: THANK YOU ACCESS!