I'm not sure if it was miked further away, or if that is simulated via scripting. There is a mic distance slider that I haven't messed with yet.
 
One other improvement that excites me, though I haven't played with it much yet, is the improved divisi. With CS2, near as I understand, it only did divisi to one level. So play one note, the selected section plays, play two or more, it steps one down. Fair enough, and works well for a lot, but what about chords with more notes? This can deal with that, as it'll do divisi automatically up to 16 notes (not between sections unfortunately).
 
The ability to play with section tightness is kinda fun. When I first loaded this midi for it, it sounded pretty sloppy, but turning down the loosen entrances slider made it very snappy.
 
It is interesting, if nothing else. I do generally like the out of box sound better.

Do I need to buy this even tho I have Komplete Ultimate 10?

Jarsve
Do I need to buy this even tho I have Komplete Ultimate 10?

That depends on what you want to do. Kirk Hunter's stuff is excellent and even the more basic "Rock and Pop Strings" is a lot more fully featured than the strings in the Kontakt factory library, particularly since the TVCA4 updates. IMHO, they sound a lot better too.
 
Session Strings are made with a different purpose in mind.
 
 
 
 
 

Sycraft
Sure. As I'm wont to do, this is an old videogame MIDI file, so not at all composed for any of these string libraries. I adjusted the attack style and such to taste, but little other than that. I've got a CS2 version and a FS and LS version of CS3. In both cases the 1st violins and violas are loaded together in a Kontakt instrument. I've posted screenshots to show you settings, though you can't see everything in CS3 since the interface is so huge and Kontakt won't scale up any more.
 
In CS2 I set DivisiLive on, Accent MF style with Marcato accents and reverb off. In CS3 I set it to Marcato articulation, turned loosen entrances down to 6, set it for "bone dry" and turned the violas section down to 12 players to match CS2. As far as I know the auto divisi is always on in CS3. All of them are playing through a QL Spaces reverb so they all have the same verb on them (all set at the same level).
 
Files were produced just be switching the output and bouncing the tracks again, then I cut off some leading silence and normalized them in Sound Forge. No additional processing. There is a bit of apparent level difference since this was just a peak normalize, not something to try and balance apparent volume.
 
Concert Strings 2 (settings)
Concert Strings 3 Full Samples (settings)
Concert Strings 3 Lite Samples (settings)
 
Should give you a rough idea of the sound differences. You'd probably want someone who's an actual composer to do a better demo, but this should help you hear basic differences, and isn't biased towards any of them by virtue of being tracked for generic strings libraries.
 
As others noted, CS3 can hit the CPU pretty hard. I don't think Kontakt threads out its scripts as well as it could because it'll hit one core more than the others. With the big CS3 multi and some pretty crazy input, I was seeing spikes near 100% on a core. Never went in to the red that I saw, but close, and I'm running on a i7-5930K at 4GHz off of SSDs so this is a pretty heavy hitting computer.
 
Something else to make note of if you want to use the big multi is maybe turn down the number of basses and cellos. The thing ships with 16 chairs of basses which gets a bit overwhelming in most mixes. Maybe knock it down to 8 or 6 to start.

 
Thanks. Both sound good. The FS does sound a bit better, but I'm not sure if it's the settings or what but the FS sounds fuller on the bottom and the top end is less harsh. I think both are an improvement on CS2 and I like how the fast runs sounded in your examples. Thank you for making the examples.

I do like the FS sound better myself. The Ls sounds a tiny bit synthy to me. The issue is that it only reuses the same 4 sets of samples over and over, presumably with some detuning or delay, but that doesn't get the same sound as individual samples.

bitflipper
I still haven't tried all the instruments in CS2!

Me neither.
I may not have even paid off that portion of the credit card yet either, for that matter! Lol

Last years' regressive sale was in june.  

Concert Strings 3 - Updated Free Demo
http://www.kirkhunterstudios.com/cs3.html