I do agree Ulis project, is an amazing endeavour. There are many great parts in his rendering. But there ARE issues, and I am glad Uli did not take my post personally. There are parts that are very good, but parts that do need work. Acknowledging this is a step forward for Uli and all of us.
To say that VSL sounds good out of the box is misleading. Let me clarify. By this I DO NOT mean that the individual samples are not good....they are the best out there as I just said, from my experience. But what I meant when I said they are not good out of the box is that one needs to give intricately detailed articulations and dynamics to make them sound good. (NOTE: I DO NOT mean that one needs to change the frequency content of these samples...not at all !!!) This is much like a real orchestra with excellent musicians. Imagine for a moment that the performers are not human but mechanically receive instructions. They have to be specified exactly what to do with dynamics and articulation or otherwise they wont sound good. Even if they were humans, would anyone ever walk into, say the berlin philharmonic, and expect them to sound good 'out of the box'? Now add to that in the virtual instrument world, we ARE the composers, orchestrators, conductors, sound engineers all rolled into one. You expect this to be easy? If we want the virtual orchestra to eventually sound like a recording from the Berlin phil., thats not the right attitude.
Obviously there are amazing demos on this site that prove what is possible with VSL. An example is Guy Bacos who is my fav here. He is a master 'conductor' of VSL in a sense since he knows how to make this orchestra sound amazingly real, with so much expression.
Cheers