Wow guys, (and gals if there are some in those replies   )  thanks heaps!   Wonderful response.

Yep that decides it for me, I just need to figure out if I should buy the cheap K8 and then go the upgrade path, or just wait and buy K9 cold?

The K8 Ultimate would have been my pref, but those sets are still pretty exxy out here at over $900.....I think the ones I am looking at are the end of the distributors K8 boxed sets somehow....hence the $400 price...

Righto, time to go and do some number-crunching 

Again many thanks to all who contributed - it is greatly appreciated....

Cheers

The Ultimate comes with nearly 250 GB of software and sounds, encompassing most every sound they ever made, I think.

It's well worth it.

I do not know anything about Komplete 9, but will start looking.

Bob Bone

Thanks Bob,

I am told that out here (Oz) the K9 Ultimate will retail for around $1200

WOW.  I will HAVE to go see what it offers that I don't already have.  I don't really need any more trance synths, but expanded libraries for Kontakt - sure.

Bob Bone

Yeah it sort of makes me think I might sit back for a while :) mebbe just stick with the Essentials version I have and just add a library or two!

Well, all the folks here, myself included, LOVE Kontakt, Reaktor, Massive, and many of the other synths.  Kontakt is a FLAGSHIP sampler.  Battery 3 is also crazy good as a drum synth.

I think you are much better off getting into SOME version of Komplete.  You will be very happy.

Bob Bone

The upgrade to Ultimate (from same) is about $400 (source NI's site). I was looking pretty hard at the RC24 and RC48 reverb products (about $200 stand alone) and then I saw the stuff on Session Drummer so for me the $400 is an okay price.

If you are just dipping into NI for the first time I admit the $1099 price for Ultimate seems steep - it is steep but you get a lot of bang for the buck. If you can swing it you should try if not then by all means get the base package and do the upgrade what 10 comes out. 

Regards

Perhaps the first question to ask is what do we really intend to use out of it?

I'm finding the more I look at it, the less I want from it. Kontakt Player 5 Free seems to be okay for now (and I haven't really used it much for anything lately either). But the other developers I look at often have their formats written for Kontakt Player 4/5 Full and then the price difference seems to bump us into the Komplete.

I'm a long time Absynth user and I upgraded to Komplete 8 so I could add Kontakt to my arsenal. I also use the kits in Battery quite a bit. I haven't had much time to dive into Massive or Reaktor. I'm not planning on upgrading to 9 due to the fact that I don't think a new version of Battery is worth it for me. I say get 8. You won't be disappointed. But plan on a "few" hours to install it all.

Besides the extremely high quality of Kontakt and Battery 3, Reaktor is an AMAZING synth.

Reaktor lets you build synths that can combine different kinds of synthesis, creating an incredible array of synths.

I had someone build 2 sounds for me in Reaktor.  1 was a recreation of the intro sound used in Baba O'Reilly.  We used the circuit diagrams for the original home theater organ that Pete Townsend used for the original tune.  The 2nd sound is the organ intro to Won't Get Fooled Again.  The organ sound was also played on that same home theater organ that Pete Townsend used for Baba O'Reilly.  These 2 sounds are near PERFECT recreations.

Here is a link for a BADLY PLAYED quick and dirty example of the Baba and Won't Get Fooled intro's, using my Reaktor 5 sounds:

http://www.bizweb411.com/...etball/games/baba.html  There are also literally HUNDREDS, if not thousands by now, freely available for download Reaktor synths created by Reaktor users, and shared on the Native Instruments site.

Bob Bone