Thanks, glad you liked my article 😀
I'm not trying to be difficult, but with all respect, I think you're putting words into my mouth 😀 I'm not steering anybody anywhere, I was merely reflecting to this statement of another poster, based on my experience and quite thorough research (I spent almost a month recording the materials and writing that article):
Nuked SC-55 also means actually emulating a SC-55 from it's original ROMs where as SCVA is based on the SC-8820 which has a lot of differences such that "accurate" SC-55 playback on it isn't really possible.
Yeah, so I strongly disagree with the "lot of differences" part. I'd say the SCVA is mostly accurate, to the point that regular people will find it difficult to find any difference unless they actively train themselves to hear said differences and know what to listen for exactly. Roland did a very good job emulating the SC-55 in the SC-8820 and consequently in the SCVA. I go into detailed analysis about those differences in my article that I found when comparing 40+ DOS game soundtracks' renditions on the SC-55 vs SCVA. Yeah, those differences bother me a little, but it would be dishonest for me to say "there are a lot of differences". The differences are extremely minor—but yeah, for a "purist" they can be annoying, no doubt.
I'm very happy about Nuked SC-55, of course, and discussing the SCVA might be a moot point. However, I have a compulsion to correct factually wrong statements—I'm annoying like that 😀
I wouldn't really say this is only my "opinion". Opinions are something like "I like this book", or "I did not enjoy that movie". When you do A/B tests, or better, blind A/B/X tests to eliminate expectation bias, and form a viewpoint based on that, that goes beyond mere "opinion" and starts approaching "facts" very quickly (if you have a functional ear 😀) I'd say my hearing is more attuned to small details than that of an average human too because of spending more than 30 years doing music as a hobby.
Having said all that, based on my A/B tests (here we go again 😀), the Nuked SC-55 is basically flawless, and beats the SCVA (if that's what you wanted to hear 😀). Except for the analog stage emulation... Both the SCVA and the Nuked SC55 suffer from some "wimpiness" on bass and transient heavy materials as I explained in my article. But that's not too surprising as they only emulate the digital parts of the box, and the slight analog saturation/distortion part is missing. However, that part is relatively easy to add or fake with some extra saturator stages.
Peace 😀
DOS: Soyo SY-5TF, MMX 200, 128MB, S3 Virge DX, ESS 1868F, AWE32, QWave, S2, McFly, SC-55, MU80, MP32L
Win98: Gigabyte K8VM800M, Athlon64 3200+, 512MB, Matrox G400, SB Live
WinXP: Gigabyte P31-DS3L, C2D 2.33 GHz, 2GB, GT 430, Audigy 4