I was not really sure where to post this; I couldn’t figure out a way to make this a general “Virtual Instruments” post. In any case, I have been tracking the differences between different Absolute VST Collections for a while, and with the release of Absolute 7, I decided to publicly share my worksheet and insights. You can see my short article describing Absolute’s history here. That post also describes how to interpret the worksheet, which you can access via links in the post, or by clicking here.
With Absolute 7, the Steinberg Download Assistant now organizes all the included products by plugin, which is very helpful. Before this, there was just a flat list of products to install, and it didn’t list the prerequisites for any of the expansion content- this was actually the whole reason I started my worksheet; so I knew which expansions used which plugins. But now everything is separated into instrument-specific subfolders.
Anyway, I hope someone finds this info useful in making their own purchasing decisions. Steinberg Absolute VST Collection Version Comparison.