New virus ti2 owner--is mine really new?
 

I just bought a Virus Ti2 keyboard from a popular online retailer. I am a composer for film and also putting together a live electronic music and percussion show. I live in Michigan and have composed the music for several well known documentaries.
Day one with the Virus I love the sound pallet it provide and the immense direct control!
The box my virus ti2 came in had a big dent in it, the plastic wrapping was taped shut, the manual had a few punctures in the cover and was the corners looked thumbed through. The bag the power cord had been in was cut open. There was an inspection tag labeled 2008. The end pieces are not the reddish wood so it must be a Ti2 not a Ti... The multi banks are blank, maybe I have to down load them. I am wondering if anyone else has found the packaging to seem this second hand, or maybe I got a return?

Sounds like you have a Virus TI if the inspection tag is 2008 as the TI2 was released just after the NAMM in the beginning of 2009.

Don't now what happened to the rest of your virus....but it sounds fishy and more like a used version then a brand new one.

The fact that the multi banks are blank is normal....you have to program themselves by selecting the appropiate sounds to create one.

Thanks for responding. Do some more recent Ti's have the brown as opposed to the reddish endcaps, in other words is the color a definitive way to tell the difference?

Could you please tell me how the keyboard looks like :
(next to the wood used look also at the colors and graphics)

TI1 : http://soundtrack.ie/virus_ti_kybd_angle.jpg

TI2 : http://www.long-mcquade.com/files/2696/lg_virus.jpg

I think its the second one with the smaller virus logo. I don't have internet at the cabin where I am working right now, will in the next few days. So it's a ti2 I presume. By the way, it's an amazing board when you start putting sounds together. Don't yet understand the multi-sequencer-patch relationship. Just irritated I got a repacked synth from the dealer.

In the old Viruses, a Multi simply 'pointed' to destinations of patches in the Single banks, therefore if you edited a patch in Single mode, it would also change all the Multis that pointed to that patch.

In the TI things are different and better. The 'Multis' are actually banks of slots available for loading in entirely new 'Singles' for layering together. Instead of the Multi simply pointing to patch destinations in the Single banks, the Multi now hosts its own single patches within the Multi, meaning you can tweak all the patches in the Multi bank independently and it wont affect anything else, and similarly you can tweak all the patches in the Single banks and it wont affect the Multis.

Consider Multis as being new banks of patches for either layering or sequencer use.

PS > Welcome. :)

I've been working with synths since around 1993, and one of the things i found always most irritating were the multis.

In the vast majority of past and present synths, the instruments programmed into a multimode are a reference to the sounds in single mode. That means if you have inst A17 on track 01, then you go into single mode and edit A17, next time to go into multimode you´ll find you got the "new" A17 not the old. That was a real problem, because if you needed slight variations of A17 (eg different LFO quantization) for different multis, you had to use another slot in the memory like A18.

VIRUS solves this by putting real copies of the singles into the multi (not just pointers) so if you edit one single of the multi, the variation is kept in the multi without affecting the original or the other copies you may have on other multis.