Strange taste...

I have a probably rare problem (actually I have several). I have many soft synths but I find it really hard to find many artificial or 'synth'sounds that would please me. Also I have a smaller problem regarding finding pleasing natural sounds. I have NI's FM8, Waldorf Largo, Arturia's Sem V and the Analog experience Player 25, Halion Sonic 1 and probably hundreds of free synths. Still I end up using the same couple of synths and not many different sounds. I have tried to get quality synths but not with very good results. I find most sounds simply unusable, strange noises. Now I would like to hear if I have any 'fellow sufferers' or am I an 'unique freak'. Also I would like to hear if there are people here that have used synths I mentioned and are very pleased. Even better would be if I could hear songs made with them. I forgot the name of an orchestral sampler which I like.
What would be even better is if you could come up with ideas that would free me from this 'curse'.

kakku

Thank you Wookiee for your long and good advice. I have tried tweaking the sounds but I have not benefited from doing that but maybe I should just try harder. But one problem is that there are so many sounds and I usually do not find any new sounds that I like enough to start fiddling around. But maybe I just need to make new sound explorings with the synths I got. Atm though that is bit difficult as I don't have access to my main computer where lies the majority of my bought synths. The song example was a very nice retro piece.
kakku

A lot of developers feel the need to make their sound as big and impressive as possible on their own, so much that it's practically impossible to integrate them in the context of a piece of music. They exaggerate things a bit.
 
Those presets are drenched in reverb and chorus and such, and some of them are so over the top that they'll clip your inputs with a single note (hello Cakewalk's Zeta).
 
Then there's also the other demo factor - in order to demonstrate all that you can do with their synths, developers will often include some extreme settings as exemples. If memory serves me well, Arturia tend to include many of those more extreme presets which pertain more to texture and effects than music. And that's understandable because people use synths for sound design too.
 
 
The funny thing is that synths which aren't drenched in effects are often criticized by people for sounding "sterile", yet they work incredibly well in context (Logic's ES-2 is a fine example of that) and can be as impressive as the next guy if you start cheating and adding tons of effect.
 
I do think that most any of the synths you mention are capable of generating great results.
 
Personally, I tend to stick to the same set of synths, and since I'm still quite green at programming them, I start w/ presets and work my way up from there. The first things I do is usually to turn off or at the very least cut back on the effects. 
 
 

Good advice so far. Tweaking the presets is often a very useful exercise, and as has been indicated by others here, your first tweak should usually be to find where the "effects" are and kill them. A synth preset that has been designed to solo in a live performance, and especially to demo a keyboard, is likely to have a thick pile of effect feces obscuring the basic sound. Something that works by itself with bouncing stereo fields or science fiction inspired half octave tremolo, is not usually what you want. Combining several sounds placed in different locations by manipulating the synthetic stereo field and reverb typically results in a confusing cacophony of uncontrolled echoes. You can set the location better by using the effects in your DAW on relatively dry synth sounds.
 
On the other hand, trying to get a synth to sound like your favorite wood and string analogue instrument is probably a waste of your time. Hire a performer, or use an expensive sample library--which has its own problems.

Get yourself a subscription to Groove3 and watch some synth courses. I know there's an excellent one for FM8 but there may be some for some other synths you own too. They'll really open your eyes as to the possibilities. I find synth manuals very hard to read because they're so dry, technical and unmusical, but with the Groove3 courses I've become quite confident in making my own sounds from scratch.

You may find these links to Sound on Sound useful they should all be available for free.
 
20 Tips on Synth programming
 
Synth School Part 1 of 12 This has links to the other 11 parts at the end of the page