The current lack of “NT” upgrades to Reality products does not need to be a problem. Many of the new architectures introduce delays that Reality users have never had. Seer products work great with Windows 95/98/Me, as long as you avoid WDM drivers that come with some new sound cards. They also work well with Cakewalk, Cubase, and all the other major sequencer programs as-is. We also observe an international market persists were OS and cpus are not changed as frequently. The price-to-performance ratio of a sufficient Intel PC, Reality or Surreal, sequencer and digital output card simply cannot be beat.

We are not aware of anyone who has exhausted the sonic potential of these instruments. Most importantly, As we’ve always said, if all you want is a simple “analog” synth, or just a sample-playback engine, go and buy the flavor of the month. On the other hand if you want a totally integrated instrument that includes analog, FM, Sondius physical modeling, sampling, modal synthesis – the whole tradition – all available simultaneously, we’re basically the only game in town. And you can always try our free demo versions first on a modern installation.

Here is the reason Reality did not continue—our core interrupt-driven engine became forbidden. The report documents the technical requirements for a complete rewrite which, with installation, testing—and aiming at a moving audio OS target with which we were abundantly familiar from our CTL work—converged on an estimated $1M cost. And it would have sounded worse than what we already had running on a $100 Creative Labs card with S/PDIF!