Every year around the time of the NAMM show, many of us cross our fingers hoping for a Virus-related announcement, but are disappointed year after year.
This should make a good thread for intertwining substantiated facts with pure speculation to come up with a compilation of conspiracy theories
I'll go ahead and start...
A Virus equivalent of Maschine would imply processing takes place on the host system (PC or Mac) rather than a dedicated hardware device, and thus the Virus would then become merely another soft-synth. This is one of those scenarios that consumers of the product would love but manufactures of the product would hate. Apple and the lessons learned from Steve Jobs before he passed have sent the message to many companies that the profit margin potential on hardware is greater than with software alone, and that more tightly integrated hardware and software, particularly closed and proprietary systems, quite frankly make more money at the end of the day. For this reason, I personally believe we are currently trending the other way, with soft synth vendors looking for ways to become hardware vendors; too much financial incentive not to.
From a sheer technical standpoint, some believe the filter processing (speed thereof?) of the Virus has not yet been matched by soft-synths. I'm not sure this is necessarily true, but if there is any truth to it, the characteristics of the filters could be a result of special processors on the DSPs used by the Virus (the Freescale 56321) which have dedicated parallel filter coprocessors (dubbed EFCOP). If there is any truth to this, it would mean that general purpose computing chips like the CPUs in most folks' computer would not be able to do filters and certain types of FX (think convolution reverb) with the same efficiency as the DSP in the Virus, so any advantage to the ears of VA on dedicated hardware would be lost. I have heard that the VST plug-in standard (still the most used) does not allow for extremely efficient parallelism...again my own personal experiences with modern VSTs and their CPU core usage would contradict this... but if true, it may add another hurdle to doing sound processing on a CPU versus a dedicated DSP.
As far as connectivity and latency improvments, this seems to be the biggest area of complaint and I believe the area that we are all hoping for the big breakthrough. The question is, why hasn't it been done to date, and why is a new product line needed to accomplish it? My UltraNova, which is similar in that the sound engine is on the synth, communicates optionally with a plug-in editor via audio over USB, has an option built-in audio interface, etc. seems to have little or no issues delivering on the expectations of USB integration, at about one fifth the cost of the Virus. Granted it is mono-timbral and on paper spec offers less voices, but for the cost, someone could buy five of the things to offset that issue.
Sometimes I wonder if the exhorbant price point of the Virus isn't part of what helps to sustain it's status. Back in the 70's, Harley Davidson was getting their lunch eaten by cheaper, higher quality Japanese motorcyles, they revamped their image by dramatically increasing their price. The name of the restaurant escapes me, but a struggling sandwich shop somewhere in Philadelphia decided to achieve notoriety by offering a cheesesteak sandwich that cost $100. In both cases, it turned out to be a brilliant marketing scam for them. I'm starting to wonder if Kemper is a similar minded evil genius.