I have bought almost every popular VSTi that's come out in the last few years, so I'm gonna mention a few.
I agree with all the synths mentioned so far, the Rob Papen stuff is excellent, and I agree with maara on Predator, and Papen's Albino and Blue are very good too.
I think Komplete 7 is the best overall deal in the industry, worth it for Kontakt alone and the synths are top quality too. I figure anybody on this forum who triggers VST's with their MPC would have good use for Battery too.
Omnisphere and Trilian are very expensive but I think totally worth the investment for what you get.
Camel Alchemy is incredible, as it has user sample import that Omnisphere lacks. You can actually load converted .sfz sampler patches to it, so you can load it with E-MU, old Akai S patches etc. , and morph it into something totally different.
If you're chasing that Access Virus sound through VST's, there's some excellent choices. Synapse's Dune sound's great and is pretty straightforward to program. Tone2's Firebird covers similar ground in a simpler synth for a bit less cash.
reFX's Nexus is another popular option with Virus fans, but has almost no synthesis/sound sculpting capabilities. The hype over it's sound quality are justified though, but you'd want more sound packs ($$$), whereas with something like Alchemy, the sound sets aren't as necessary because it's still a proper synth. I recommend Tone2's ElectraX and Gladiator over Nexus for the same reason. These 2 in particular can do any sound Nexus does without needing GB's of sample data. Tone2's DSP code is actually used in most reFX products, so again, if you like Nexus but want that sound in a fully tweakable synth, Tone2 or Dune are the move. Lastly Cakewalk's z3ta+ does a good Virus impression and is on sale for $20USD right now. The upgrade to v2 will be an additional $49.
For the vintage analog sounds the Arturia stuff is great as mentioned earlier. I recently bought 2 synths from XILS lab, PolyKB and their new Synthix. The company is run by a former Arturia employee, and his DSP quality is on par if not better than the excellent Arturia stuff. PolyKB sounds so good and is so easy to program, that I'm actually holding off on buying a Dave Smith Tetra. Lennear Digital's Sylenth1 is another synth that does very convincing retro analog.
Sorry for the novel
, just wanted to mention all these as I don't feel like my money was wasted on any of these for the power I got in return.
