Wow, Steffen, you really don't have any worklife do you. Way too much time on your hands obviously. You really should get a job. Or maybe go back and stare proudly at your degree diploma and render some more useless classical pieces. Your presence here is just getting more and more embarrassing.
What VSL should do to "improve" SyS is frankly re-record 80% of it. But they could do it at 40-50% of the time spent on the original and get a much better library.
They should:
- Record fewer dynamic layers. Half as many would do, the proof is in SyS that all those layers don't pay off.
- Record fewer different vibrato types. Non-vib and "espressivo" would be enough. Nobody likes the standard vibrato in the library it seems. Also, you don't need to do as many non-vib dynamic layers as you do vibrato. 3 nonvib, 4-5 vib would be plenty enough.
- Record less precise staccatos. And do both staccatos and spiccatos for better flexibility.
- Rehearse a little music with the musicians before recording the samples. And tell them to carry that into the samples as good as they can and not care about being too perfect, but more being musical. A little coaching should help on the sound, get more life into the samples.
- Then there is the sound. That is a tough one. The room sounds like it does I guess. But there are quite some ugly resonance going on. Don't remember exactly where but typically you get problems in the lower mid-mid end from 500-1200hz. Violins generally have some harsh stuff going on at 1500+3500hz but that's managable with EQ so I wouldn't focus on that. I would see if the room needs treatment to handle the lower frequencies.
That could be a "Synchron Strings - reworked". Still a huge undertaking but would take less than 50% of the time of the original library to do. That is the only way SyS will have a chance to become a great string library; doing re-recordings. Sorry, no way around it. And that probably won't happen - not for the next 5 years+. They might decide to go back and record another string library, but I am sure they won't spend so many resources to re-do and fix SyS 1.