As was already said, you should be able to make very high-quality recording with either VST5 or SX. I really like SX more than VST5 for these reasons:
1. SX has unlimited undo. This is great for trying things out and then undoing them. Make multiple edits and listen to how it sounds. If you don’t like it, undo it.
2. Automation is much easier to work with in SX. You can draw it in with a pencil tool if you want. I work this way instead of using the mixer.
3. The user interface is cleaner and simpler to me. MIDI and Audio channels are more similar to each other.
4. You don’t have to worry about the concept of channels anymore. In SX, there are only tracks. Each track is essentially a channel. So you don’t have to assign tracks to channels.
There are lots of other minor things that I like better also, but the above are the major ones for me. As was said, SX supports surround sound, but I don’t use that.
What does VST5 have that SX doesn’t have (yet)?
1. Dynamic events—volume and pan automation that is associated with an audio part and stays with it when you move the part around.
2. SX has no Studio Module, so managing your external keyboard patches in SX is not up to speed with VST. Steinberg is reportedly working on adding something like this for the next major SX version.
3. No automated way to match tempo to a freely recorded audio track. Although there is a manual method that I happen to like better since the VST automated way never worked well for me.
4. There are a bunch of things missing that one might consider minor, things that only a few people probably used like the Interactive Phrase Synthesizer (a kind of arpeggiator toy) and Style trax (I don’t know much about it, never used it.)
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