Since purchasing, I've been playing around with combining microphones, and I'm happy with the results. I really like the sound of the Close position, but the Close + Hammers setting seems like it would work great in dense mixes (rock, indie, maybe even blues) with more emphasis on the hammers if things are really busy and a super close sound is needed. Close + Room gives a nice sense of space based on how loud you want the room. In a piano-ballad type situation, that may be a good go-to set. Then there's Close + Main is just a very nice sounding combo to my ear and would probably work well in a variety of genres.
Depending on what I want to do mix-wise, I could see any of the above being used, though you're absolutely right in that Close and Main both sound very good by themselves. But so far, I feel like the Room and Wide positions benefit from the reinforcement of adding either Close or Main and blending (I'm not doing any classical, where either of those solo may be totally the right call). Binaural is probably something I'd only use if playing with headphones on.
From a CPU/RAM performance perspective, in a blank project at least, two positions seems to work fairly well here even at 64 sample buffer (RME Fireface). I'm running off an SSD though (6kb preload buffer in Kontakt). Haven't tried 3 positions at once yet (haven't found a need), and totally suspect that would be overkill (from both a CPU and "is this necessary" perspective).
Yes there is surprisingly a lot of room reverb with the sustain samples in the binaural mics. And what sucks is that you can't tame it, it seems present in the sustain samples. I wanted to contact Alex about it. Maybe i should.
