Get all your news in one place.
100's of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
MusicRadar
MusicRadar
Entertainment
Roland Schmidt

The ultimate synth shoot-out 2026: Hardware classics vs. their software successors - but can you really tell which is which?

Software vs Hardware.

SYNTH WEEK 2026: Once upon a time, the only discussion that mattered to us music tech types, was whether Macs were better than PCs. While that conversation still crops up from time-to-time, it's largely become irrelevant, with the pace of technology clearly leaving not much between the two. Today, how you make your music is purely a matter of taste.

If you are making music within a DAW, you will doubtless have many plugin synths to call upon, whether they form part of your DAW package, purchased as third-party propositions, or are sampled/modelled to sound like hardware. These days, as with the inner workings of the computers that run them, the quality bar is set very high.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100's of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.