S90es action vs VMK-188 Plus action

[alexpow]

Hi Guys,

I am on the market for a keyboard/controller and was wondering if anyone could tell me if the action on the VMK-188 Plus was comparable to the action of the s90es. I have played and enjoyed the action on the s90es, but I can't find any store with the VMK-188 Plus to try out. I plan on using it with East West/Quantum Leap pianos, so sounds are not an issue.

Thanks!

Alex

 

[kanthos]

You might want to consider some of the M-Audio keyboards, if you haven't already. If you really don't care about sounds, the S90 ES will probably cost more than you'd need to spend just to get good action.

 

[evergreenthompson]

Welcome to the forums!

For a $1300 (VMK-188) to $1800 (M-Audio Keystation 88es) price difference compared to the S90ES, it might be worth just ordering from an online store with a good return policy and giving one of the less expensive/featured boards a try.

 

[kanthos]

The Keystation 88es is only semi-weighted; if you want weighted, try out the ProKeys 88 or the KeyStation Pro 88.

 

[alexpow]

Thanks Guys for all the responses so far!

I have not really heard anything good about M-Audio's line, but you are right about the VMK-188. It is quite a bit cheaper, and a trial run might be good.

I appreciate it!

Also, Have any of you worked with Synthology's Ivory, or East west/Quantum Leap's piano plug-ins? I have noticed that these programs are unearthly huge (EWQL pianos around 60 GB's a piece), and I'm wondering about known latency issues. I am running a Macbook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo with 3 Gb's of ram and Logic Studio 8. Do you think that this could handle such a load?

Thanks again!

 

[kanthos]

I've worked with a number of plugins, but nothing that big. 60 GB is almost half my hard drive!

A big factor would be how fast your hard drive is. You obviously won't be loading a 60 GB piano into memory all at once; the audio files will be streamed from disk instead. I'm sure it can work well, otherwise no one would buy big sample libraries like that. Your machine is above the minimum spec but below the recommended spec, so you'll have to do some tweaking or scale back some of the options, but you'll still be getting a really good sound out of that, better than you'll likely have from anything else.

Your audio interface is also a concern for latency, so make sure it's configured properly using appropriate buffer sizes, ASIO drivers if possible, etc.

As a last resort, you could always load a lightweight piano sound, from another VST or even a soundfont, as you play to reduce latency.

What you probably won't want to do, though, is use this for live performance. This is the kind of plugin that's better suited for rendering great-quality audio in a DAW. The pianos in EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Silver or in Native Instruments' Kontakt or Akoustik Pianos are a bit more realistic. I've used the pianos in Kontakt and EWQL before for live performance and gotten great results on a machine that's not as good as yours.

 

[alexpow]

Kanthos,

my native hdd is 320 GB at 7200 RPM, so its pretty quick. Another question would be: Can I load those sample libraries onto a 500 GB 7200 RPM Externall HDD and interface it with Firewire 800 with good performance.

Thanks again!

Alex

 

[kanthos]

You could try it with the firewire drive. It wasn't hard to relocate the data files in other plugins I've used before, including EWQL Symphonic Orchestra, so you could try it and see how it goes. I'd suspect you might have worse performance that way though; firewire wasn't really built for streaming large amounts of audio data like that.