What Is Your Favorite Soft-synth?, Soft-Synths Options

I am interested in hearing from the synth savvy liberace like musical masters out there...what do you think are the great, quality, analog quality soft synths out there? Would it be pluggo? reaktor? halion? fm7? i want to seperate the men from the toys so to speak. Some of the synths I have heard sound too campy and cheesy. What are the rich, thick sounding pro soft-synths?

[Levon River]

One of the best things about the FM-7 is the incredible wealth of programs that can be found for it. The Yamaha DX-7 had more programmers making patches for it than Attila had Huns, and thousands upon thousands of those patches are freely downloadable from many places. If you want that FM thang, there's none better.

For the grittier synths, NI's Pro-52 and Absynth are both pretty outstanding and very programmable.

Of course their Hammond B-3 emulator, B4, is just an outstanding piece of work, but from what you say I take it you mean synthesizers, per se.

Not only am I not affiliated in any way with Native Instruments, I've been busy trashing them in other threads for how thoroughly they've managed to ignore OS X (a tossed-off few paragraphs of promises on their site notwithstanding).

But the people sure know how to do synths and samplers and emulators; you've just got to give them their due.