Colossus offers the following sounds:

16 acoustic drum kits, 10 acoustic guitars, 05 male choirs (ah, ee, oo...) 06 female choirs, 14 electric and upright basses, 45 electric guitars, 22 electric drum kits, 05 ethnic percussion sounds, 24 ethnic pitched sounds, 128 General MIDI sounds, 13 keyboard sounds, 19 new age sounds, 27 orchestra sounds, 20 pianos, 79 pop brass sounds, 77 drone sounds, 14 synth basses, 11 synth leads, 38 synth pads, and 24 eletric organs

a total of 469 sounds (the 128 General MIDI patches being duplicates of the rest0. Now, 469 sounds is the sonic palette of a single better Akai CD-Rom. Since some of those Akai Roms (e.g. the Greytsounds one) are going now for $29 on eBay, Colossus's $995 pricing remains something of a question.

The sounds are VERY clean, crafted with utmost care. Style wise they are a combo of some Mannheim Steamroller type new age, some techno / rave and some general bread-and-butter sounds. Originality-wise, they are not really unheard-of; I have these on my Akai, and on the Akai an acoustic piano layered to an analog pad takes 10 Megabytes, not 1700 Megabytes as the Colossus's "Sundial" patch. With some Colossus sounds taking 2 Gigs, if you don't have that much RAM in your computer, you'll get sonic dropouts. On my dual 2.5 Mhz G5 I had to play the acoustic grand (Fazioli F308) monophonically (yup, one finger lines as in kindergarten :-) to avoid those dropouts. Also, unlike Akai patches, Colossus' sounds cannot be loaded into Logic's EXS sampler, nor into anything else, except Kontakt. The final kicker, even in one finger mode, my Triton's piano sound still sounds better than Colossus's.

What to say to those who cannot use Akai CD-Roms? (People without Logic, or even an old $200 Akai sampler.) Well, if $995 is they have for a major gear overhaul, a used Korg Triton with its ass-kicking sounds, arpeggiator, sequencer (and the ability to load Akai S-1000 CD-Roms) would probably still open three times more musical opportunities than Colossus. This is, of course, just my personal opinion, I might be wrong.

 East West Colossus Specifications: