The total lack of fatness and soul in those audio demo’s made me decide not to buy this thing at this moment.
It sounds like they made this instrument to produce music for phone/laptop/tablet speakers.
Not my cup of tea!
Have to say I’m a bit old fashioned too and I already have plenty of freshness in the collection with Halion Sonic.
I would say: less is more if you want to hear different aspects of this new piece of software.
Secondly: most of us potential buyers listen to these demo’s on decent studio monitors and are able to pull up their speaker volume if the material is dynamicly produced, so i would say: bypass those master compressors and limiters and bounce the demo’s again.
I assume that Halion will be an important product to sell for Steinberg so If the composer of the songs isn’t able to master these tracks, maybe they could spend a small amount of money on a mastering studio…
I’m really curious about Halion 4, but these demo’s disctract me from the real potential of it!
Actually I think it is even better not to master instrument demo’s at all.
I think we don’t want to hear what the mastering engineer can do or producer wants to hear. We need to hear the actual dry sound of the instrument and what we can do with it.
Otherwise there is no way to decide if and what adjustments this instrument need to blend in our personal sound.
But it could be those previews aren’t mastered at all and Halion 4 just sounds cold, crip and flat of course (Let’s hope not).
That would be even better, it’s more like if they are afraid that these demo’s sound too weak (ie compared to the competition) It’s better to have someone perform dynamic reduction who is good in it than someone who doesn’t.
I’m with you guys on this one after all the promotional work Steinberg put in on H4 hyping expectation I did expect something more from the demos.
I’m also in the old fashioned camp when it comes to having my master software backup on master discs which Steinberg will only allow to those purchasing the full version of Halion 4 or the Halion 3 upgrade version. It prevents this for those upgrading from the full Halion Sonic 1-5. I assume due to the aim of cutting distribution costs. This penalises the most loyal customer who have both products and wish to upgrade their Halion Sonic licence and also have H4 master discs.