Larry, my man. You're getting the new Montage?? Damn, that board has a lot of guys drooling over at Keyboard Corner since NAMM. A lot of guys over there are B3 fanatics including me and the Montage hasn't improved Yamaha's clonewheel any but everything else is just killer. That's why I have my SK1 and a Vent.

Back on topic, I agree that Kontakt is an industry standard and I wouldn't be surprised if some serious audio geeks were to carefully go through several hundred instruments both solo'd and in a mix comparing them that K might win but from what I've heard ST3 is still very good and well worth it. The fact that IKM seems to be discounting it doesn't mean it's bad it could simply be a reflection of the market and it's hard to compete with the bigger names.

This is so subjective though. You can put a barely decent piano patch in a 10 piece horn band mix and never tell that patch is not as good as another but solo that piano with just an acoustic bass and it's a totally different story. Same with any of those other thousands of patches. It all depends on what you're doing, what the other instrumentation is, what you're looking for etc etc etc...

I'm buried in taxes right now and won't pick this up until the end of April but after that I'll test it out.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.