Hey All,
 
Kinda new to Cakewalk (early 2014) and the forums.  Amazing product, and everyone here seems so helpful.  I've learned alot just reading everyone's posts, and some of the great content and tutorials put in here by staff.  I had a quick questions about drum virtual instruments, and it relates to the upgrade to the new Sonar.
 
I currently have X3e Studio, which has been an amazing (I'm still finding my way around).  I thought about getting Producer back then, but it seemed the biggest difference was the inclusion of Addictive Drums.  I already had Toontrack's Superior Drummer 2.3, so I figured I'd just go with Studio.  I wish now I had upgraded at Christmas just for all the Prochannel goodies, but no sense crying over missed opportunities. :)
 
I am looking at upgrading to Professional (as I don't think I will be able to talk the wife into the extra $200 to upgrade to Platinum).  I was wondering what peoples experience is with AD, and if folks have experience with SD, and if one integrates better with Sonar in terms of routing or workflow, etc?  I finally got a SD routing set up I like, but I've heard great things about AD too.
 
I'm a drummer first, so new shiny drum stuff always captures my attention :)
 
Thanks All!

Let me put it this way I've got Superior Drummer, Abbey Road Drums, Steven Slate Drums, BFD3 and AD2....
 
AD2 is the only dru rack I use these days its an awesome product and integrates seemlessly with Sonar

Plus you get 3 xpansion packs included in the price???
 
Fairfield 1 and 2 and either the jazz kits or the Reel drums make this upgrade an absolute no brainer for me

I think the AD kit presets sound way more processed than SD out of the box. SD seems a little more natural. Still, AD sounds powerful and if you add some midi paks it's really quick to work out song ideas.

I like AD2 quite a bit, but it's a bit dry if you're used to the rooms that Sup Drummer was recorded in. If you like the sound of SD2 you'll be reaching for reverb pretty regularly when you use it. That's not to say it's bad, it's just different...all in all it's a good "flavor" to have.
 
Dean

All of the drums in SD are raw, so they need their own mix job. I'm not sure if the same is true for AD2 (I don't think it is), but I'm still going to get it when I hopefully upgrade to the new Sonar, even though I do prefer to do my own mixing on the drums, which I'm still getting better at. I have Steven Slate Drums 4 too, and I still prefer Superior Drummer 2. SSD4 most definitely has a machine gun effect going on with the toms and I think the kick, from when I last used it.
 
I have no problems integrating SD with Sonar.

The last track I completed involved experimenting with every drum program I have - AD1, SD2 and EZD2 (that I have a lot of expansion packs for). I was layering kits and chopping and changing and getting into a right mess.
I then used the stock SD2 program on its lonesome and it all came together. It's easy to add things like reverb but it's hard to take it away if it's already there.
Other people's mileage may vary.

Grum.

AD sounds good "out of the box" and that is because they are tweaked quite a bit, with compression and processing. But you can easily work up a dry kit if you want - the underlying samples are very good.
 
Caveat: I've never used a competing drum product.

As a drummer I have come a different conclusion. I have SD2, Steven Slate, and some Kontakt drums. Altogether I have probably 25 or more kits. I don't need any more kits or plugins I need to learn. I need to figure out how to optimize the kits I own. Mostly that is done by playing my ekit better! There are reasons to possibly upgrade from X3, but more kits is not one of them for me.

Wow.  Thanks for the quick feedback all.
 
I have definitely loved SD since I picked it up to provide the sounds for my TrapKAT.  The first time I did a recording with it, and played it back, it was really hard to believe it was a midi kit triggering samples.  edrums have come a LONG way since the first time I had tried them out, back with the early vdrum kits.
 
It might be nice to have something like AD in my tool box though for when I'm throwing together a quick sketch, as I'm still learning all of the ins and outs of taming those raw drums sounds in different ways.  Plus, the Black Velvet ADpak basically replicates my old acoustic drum set up drum-for-drum and cymbal-for-cymbal, so might be nice just for nostalgia's sake :)