With everything in between 20-90 voices a synth needs headroom. Most virtual instruments are designed to work with much less headroom and therefore they are louder. In our opinion it should be the users decision, what he wants to do with the entire dynamic range. There is plug-ins which seem to limit the output (which results in more loudness and unfortunately artefacts as well) - when we designed Total Integration we decided against this notion.
If you feel that other plug-ins are louder, reduce the level of the other plug-ins. Most DAW mixers are floating point but even with 24 bits fix point, there is no disadvantage in reducing the level.
In my personal opinion, many people mix the wrong way on digital systems. i did this myself for years. I've used my first digital desk, a yamaha 02r, like an analogue mixer, driving every channel as hot as possible only to find out much later that the desk distorted internally and all my mixes sounded two dimensional and cold. The theory of achieving loud mixes by having a hot signal on every individual channel just doesn't work in the digital domain. Since there is no noise to battle, it's much easier to keep the headroom and control the loudness of the mix at the output/stem instead of crushing every individual channel. On top, once you got digital distortion in your master signal, you will not get it out easily. and even, if you don't hear it, techniques like multiband compression/limiting and especially psycho acoustic algorithms might emphasis the distortion and will present you with crackling and other artefacts.
hth, marc
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