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After ten years of ignorance, I got more interested in the Virus. I have to add, that I played with one of their first prototypes, back in the days, and that thing was buggy. That turned me off and I end up buying a NL2 that served me well over the years. However, the TI grabbed my attention with their extended sound possiblities, e.g. wavetable, grain.

Since there were some reported problems with the TI - and I do not really to update my equipment every week - I decided to go with a used Virus Classic. I thought this way I can evaluate the Virus sound and see if a bigger investment is needed in form of TI.

After weeks of programming I come to the realization that this is a love/hate machine. I love the sounds I get out of the board that easily can keep up with some of the older Roland stuff I owned many moons ago. Nice PWM basses, smooth pads, and all in stereo! However, when I try to do other things, mainly in the higher pitch range, things are getting ugly. For example, higher pitched sounds (whatever sound you choose), FM sounds in middle to higher pitch, saturation stage (at middle and higher pitch). All is full of aliasing.

Aliasing must not be bad, e.g. I love those PPG sounds that sometimes live off aliasing and be smoothen out by the filter. But I cannot get a control over the sound with the Virus filter. I made a test and fed the Virus filter with NL2 Oscillators at very high pitch. I did not notice any aliasing with the filters, so it must be the oscillator bank.

I understand that Access is cramping alot of code into this little DSP, gives us plenty of polyphony, efx, and soundpossibilites. But the fact that I cannot use it for higher pitched sound pretty much destroys the ONE KEYBOARD does it all feature that Access is trying to push on us.

Another annoyance is that when choosing the saturation stage or the distortion effect, the effect is audible even the intensity is set to 0. That is bad since it makes the blending of a distortion efx into a clean sound impossible (the K-Station is better in the case).

I guess I will stick with my classic for now, because the software is rock-solid and the sounds are great as long as you stay in the boundary of that synth. I managed to get one higher pitched sound without noticable aliasing by setting the phase of the oscillators. Any other ideas, beside cranking up the EQ what doesn't sound nice to me either. Does the TI is better in this regard??