I don't know a single prominent keyboarder who would use a Fantom-X as main source for well done synth sounds. Workstation ROMplers, even with all the very impressive functionality which some of the newer ones offer, are simply not designed to cope with full fledged analog or VA synths.
You should not ignore some simple facts:
- a real synth offers complete sound design from oscillators to complex modulation - a ROMpler can principally offer only a part of that flexibility by definition. It's main purpose is to *re*produce known waves and sounds, not to create them from scratch.
- none of the top keyboarders I know would regard *any* standard workstation as alternative for a real synth.
- a look at the extisting synth sound libraries shows at one glance, that the choice of existing low and very low quality synth sounds on the Fantom X is very high (many plastic sounds, squeaky beeps, dull basses without clear cut character, muddy-mid-heavy pads and so on), while there are extremely few impressive synth sounds on the Fantom itself, and only few more useable ones on all SRX cards together plus sample libraries.
So the pure petition of principle ("The Fantom can deliver anything, if only some skillful designers offer it") does not lead far, if you judge it by the existing quality of synth sounds.
In contrast, on The Access Virus TI I have a huge library of several thousand first class(!!!) synth sounds for free(!!!), which cover a *much* broader *synth* sound scape than anything I have ever heard on a Fantom.
For ROMpler sounds of course it's just the other way round: no synth can offer me remotely the quantity and quality of varoius "bread and butter sounds" which the Fantom offers so good and flexible.
- even workstation developers themselves acknowledge these facts:
Roland by offering the V-Synth/GT
Korg by offering synths plus special synth modules for their workstations
Do you think anybody would invest in these efforts or customers would buy custom synths, if the workstations themselves were even remotely capable of doing the same job?
- finally I have my own ears to compare what comes out of a keyboard, no matter what sound OS is working within it.
So when I'm standing in a shop and compare sounds of machines like a Moog Voyager or Little Phatty, a Dave Smith Poly Evolver, a Nord Lead, an Access Virus or the like with a Korg Trinity, a Yamaha Motif XS or a Fantom X I hear many sound differences between them which are not related to a special patch, but to the machine a s whole.
No, the Fantom is by no means a synth like my Access Virus is, and will never be. I know the potential of the Fantom X OS is underestimated, just because most don't have the skill and patience to dig as deep into it as possible, or as few of you do. I acknowedge that readily.
And not to be misunderstood: I'm glad about any single well done synth patch for the Fantom: it's nice and useful to have some of them on board for small occasions, where this keyboard alone is sufficient to do what a keyboarder needs.
*But*: I still can't do with my Fantom-X what I can do with my Access TI (like vice versa), and one of them still doesn't really sound like the other.
Last point:
If any of you would be capable of delivering half a dozen of the most important Jan Hammer sounds (overdrive Minimoog solo sounds ranging from flute-like to overdriven guitar sounds in Jimi Hendrix style) I will state the opposite of what I said here and say that the Fantom X is a real synth beast.
Anyone to take the challenge?
