EWQL Gold and Platinum Quality Differences

I was thinking about investing in the EWQLSO library as it seems to be one of the best libraries for orchestral sounds to date. Does anyone have experience with these samples? I believe it comes with its own sampler, so a sampler like Gigastudio would not be needed, correct? Does anyone know how the Plantinum differs from the Gold, regarding sound quality only? I think Gold contains 16 bit samples and Platinum contains 24 bit samples, but would these differences make that much of a difference? They may, but I am not sure. And my last but most important question is, can anyone offer their insight as to whether these demos in the link below are played using their 24 bit samples or 16 bit samples? The sellers did not make this clear.

EWQLSO Gold Pro XP

1. Yes it comes with Komakt so there is no need for sampler.

2. Differences:

i. 24-bit vs 16-bit

ii. 3 mic positions vs 1 mic position (F)

iii. More velocity layers (Platinum of course)

3. Differences are not so big, unless you're working for DVD (24-bit), or surround (5.1) system, where the 3 mic positions are essential.

4. All demos are made with Platinum XP Pro! No official demos for Gold xp pro, but check the forums (Sounds on line) for a user named Tchoyy. He's simply put amazing!

Ahh, I knew I had a good reason to be amazed by those samples, they were 24 bit, no wonder. Thank you very much. I will try to check out how Gold samples sound, by browsing through that forum.

I just ordered Gold XP Pro today. Hopefully by the end of the holidays all my work will be rendered using it as well as my current samples.

Marius you will be more than happy with your new "toy".

Hmmm...one more question. What is the difference between Platinum and Platinum Pro XP? Is it worth spending the extra bucks for Platinum Pro XP?

:-/

A difficult one

My main issue with EW is this:

Their marketing strategies kinda suck! I mean you get a 50% (actually can get you more (66%) for Platinum only, I hope it still works, if you want. You cna find it at 995$, platinum!), but, even with that sale, there are new products coming in NAMM.

Which means that pretty soon you will feel left out, you will want the new products, and the worst support will start to dissapear. Already normal platinum/gold/silver are considered a little museum items.

Now onto a more deep answer:

With xp pro you get the following bad issues:

* You will need an extra 70 Gb

* If you want to keep using normal platinum, you will have to copy the normal platinum nki files, and NOT delete the old folder, which means that your hard disk will contain 2 platinum and 1 xp pro! That is a massive 200 GB (more or less) (<-but I think there is a way to avoid doing that, but it takes a lot of computer knowledge, although there is a guide somewhere on the SOL site)

* It costs

* Pretty soon support will dissapear, and EW has already announced 5 new products for early Jan 2007.

Now on the good parts:

* Xp pro, has many new articulations which help a lot

* It has repeated articulations to avoid the "machine gun" effect

* It has solo strings

* It has chamber strings (4 violins, 3 violas, 3 violoncellos), for divizi effects (but the articulations are somewhat limited)

* New and more percussion

* includes a Piano

Now, I personally had gold for about a year. When the opportunity for a sale knock, couldn't resist anymore and went for gold xp pro. But it's at 500$, not 1500$ (sale included).

But is IS a great addition to a library and compliments the normal one pretty well.

One thing you need to consider finally is this:

Do you have a sequencer?

How do you work, cause with Platinum you usually need a second (slave) cmoputer, or at least A LOT of RAM. XP pro needs more than that

Do you have much practice with production and sequencers? Cause if not, maybe platinum can be daunting at first, wher gold, is realyl straight forward.

If you have the money, definately go for it, no doubt! Just make sure you know (in yourself) where you're treading. :P