well, after a long and deliberate eval of what's out there I did indeed opt to go for Spectrasonics's Atmosphere. BTW, Atmosphere is a sample based synth, not a sampler as I had previously mentioned, which has an enormous set of presets. Over 1000. It was actually the number of presets that won me over and of course the quality. I'm not a synth guy per se i.e. I am not into tweaking patches, making my own etc. I just want a sonic palette that I can dip into for my compositions. As far as to the quality that unfortunately had to be based on a demo video and on its perceived quality based on a very long list of professional music artist that have used Spectrasonics. I'm guessing that the main reason that they don't provide a demo is because it would be impractical. Their samples are actually buried into one extremely large file , over 3 gigs
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I was actually able to purchase a legit copy of Spectrasonic's Atmosphere on Ebay. Yes, really. I'm now a fully registered user of Atmosphere. So far, some of the most beautiful sounds that I have ever heard from a synth. I can see why this has been used so much for movie scoring. Not that it has not been used for music. Lyle Mays from the Pat Metheny band is apparently one of their users.
BTW, here is a link to an article on one of Spectrasonic's users , Bob James , a Jazz recording artist which has released 36 albums. Its titled "Creating Real Jazz with Virtual Instruments".
http://www.spectrasonics.net/news/2007/bob-james-creating-real-jazz-with-virtual-instruments/enjoy.
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