Wow! I was caught by surprise when the demo finally showed up on the downloads page this evening, and installed immediately. I was in the midst of evaluating some other plug-ins that expire tomorrow, so couldn't devote much time to Vienna Suite, but already my first impression is that these are the most transparent native plug-ins I've ever used.
I don't normally use presets, but the ones provided are excellent, and given my limited experience with mixing orchestral content, I may well find them superior to my own experimenting -- at least as a starting point. I haven't been using much EQ with VSL yet, or much processing other than convolution reverb to be frank. Just panning, levels, and occasional EQ for specific instruments. That could change!
The Master EQ, which adds the shelving controls to the regular EQ, gave a Synchrosoft error as being unavailable on the license. Not sure if this was intentional or not, but I will have little trouble making my final evaluations based on just a few of the plugs (I have tried the multi-band and EQ so far and have been blown away by both, to the point that I may find I no longer need outboard gear!).
When I have more time and energy (hopefully tomorrow night), I will do a direct shootout of the EQ vs. MOTU's MasterWorks EQ, which believe it or not, even though it's free with Digital Performer, has continued to win hands-down in every shootout I've ever done of even the "best" boutique EQ's, in terms of transparency. Only the similar Sonnox Equaliser pips it out, and only in the higher frequencies.
Some serious mangling for pop productions is possible with these plug-ins as well, but the important thing is that the basic timbre doesn;t change. This is how I define transparency. I can even see using these plugs for special effect type processing for spoken word and even audio restoration nit-picking where standard audio cleanup plugs need to be augmented now and then. Great telephone preset BTW!
I'll definitely be buying this. My timing will be based not on when the demo expires, but when the Jazz Drums become available. I'm hoping soon, because as soon as I became aware of this new library, I put on hold the completion of a revision to a jazz soundtrack I did a couple of years back (I'm hoping to formalise it finally into a release, as the original was done as a favour for a friend's student film project).