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After 9 months of use, I can say that I still use my Sirius. There are some incredible sounds in it and you can create all new sounds by tweaking knobs or, if you're lazy, just press the random sound button.
I hate synth wars ("my X synth is better than your Y synth") so I just decided to buy all of them: access Virus, Novation Nova, Quasimidi Sirius. They are all great and all have advantages that the others do not. I like the thunderous bass sounds you can create with the Virus. I like the polyrhythms you can create with the Nova. I like the airy synth sounds you can get with a Sirius.
The Sirius is the closest thing to an all-in-one workstation you can find. I say that after playing around with all three extensively. It is not perfect and you won't be replacing what you can do with a Virus or a Nova, but the Sirius can more than hold its own against other synths. All you need is a good sampler (like an E4XT Ultra) and you can make some serious music with any of these 3 toys.
Hell, if I had enough patience, I would be looping parts from my old EA-1 and ER-1 into my sampler and creating music that way, but why do it the hard way when there are better tools out there?
On a side note, the Nova is the easiest to use. You can do everything without opening the manual. The couple of times that I did open the manual, I found it to be very condensed reading (they must be trying to save trees). Not a very user-friendly manual.
The Sirius is the second easiest to use. I referred to the manual for clarity of the button functions on the righthand side (like how to save a patch). The manual is okay despite the translated German text. (My manual came with all the pages unbound and out of order... argh).
The Virus requires reading the manual compared to the other two. It is a hacker's toy. There are many functions that you won't know about without reading the manual. However, the manual is the best out of all three toys. I think if the manual were written like the Sirius or the Nova manual, that would be a real turnoff for users. Kudos to the author(s) of the Virus manual.
Guys, there's no point in ripping each other's toys. There are bands out there that have made lots of money making music on silly things like Casio VL-1's.
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