Wet or Dry - and why?

Hi again folks - two months later, I thought I'd come by and close the loop on this discussion, at least as far as what we've settled on.

So (as I reported elsewhere a few minutes ago) I made Brad a shopping list, and it included the wet Skinner and Basic HW. He went off to Classic MidiWorks' site and ordered up everything, and somehow the dry Skinner came instead of the wet Skinner. I hoped maybe the dry set would be adequate.

While Brad started assembling the console in his house, I assembled a computer for Hauptwerk and loaded all the software, including the dry Skinner. Then I plugged in my dumb M-Audio 49-key MIDI keyboard and some Bose computer speakers, and discovered the sound to be really dry. Like, REALLY dry. I said to Brad, "this simply will not do." He went back to Hauptwerk which set him up with the wet sample, and also an upgrade to HW while we were at it. The wet set is divine!!

A small number of you advised me (either here in the thread or via private message) to avoid the wet set due to some imperfections in the sampling. I want you to know I did consider that carefully, but decided that while I'm sure that was all true, my listening ears (and Brad's) aren't as finely tuned to those things. Granted, so far I've only heard it through Bose headphones and Bose computer speakers -- we'll see what happens when we hook it all up to the subwoofer and monitors at Brad's house.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying having this toy in my home office for a few more days. And I am seriously ready to sell a kidney in order to get my own HW instrument - I have my eye on the FCCLA Skinner.

Thanks to Brett and gang at HW for an excellent customer service experience, especially with the dual upgrades, and thanks to all of you here for your expertise concerning wet vs dry instruments! I'm sure I'll be back to bother you again in the future.

I have both the wet and dry Zwolle sample sets. The wet sample set is the latest version and the dry sample set is one of the earliest sample sets. There is a huge difference in memory requirements. I really like the dry sample set without reverberation because it sounds like a very small organ but with a vast amount of stop choices. The wet sample set, especially the latest Version 2.5, is what I play 99% of the time.

I would really like to read an opinion from someone that has a the latest (V2.5) dry sample set with added reverb, compared to the wet sample. I seem to think that the original acoustics, especially with the Zwolle, would always be preferable, sound-wise, to a dry sample set with added reverb.

Antoni

I can't compare dry and wet with Zwolle, but with Skinner the wet has a clarity of sound I can not get using convolution reverb. Some ranks have a significant tonal difference. I use the dry with reverb but find that reverb added to other sample sets can have the same effect. One other factor affecting sound clarity is speaker groupings. In general, I much prefer my wet sets to the dry ones.