Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-69.80.9.124-20180102204238/@comment-53539-20180103014632

yes, but I don't really find Meiko all that Standish, so its not much of a victory.

Meiko is based on a professional singer results while Miku is voice acting, so this is partly why Meiko sounds more realistic. The V3 update for Kaito and Meiko had different approaches and was aimed to capture tone changes rather then emotion of a character like the Miku extra vocals are.

Any single voicebank kinda sounds monotone, its one of vocaloids oldest and biggest issues. Its why extra voicebanks are often warranted in the first place. The amount of depth you get out of each voicebank varies though, some are more expressive then others like Yukari. Others just have large vocal ranges like Kokone or IA. IT also depends on language, a lot of folks try and paint the English vocals as less realistic then the Japanese, but due to the English voicebanks having more samples in them, they have more variation and end up overall more realistic for this reason. This varies per language (we only know English and Japanese, which is why most of the time these two languages get exampled).

A lot of it also depends on the engine used... Meiko V1 isn't as realistic as Meiko V3. So there was a time when Miku was a better vocal then Meiko overall for this reason. There is also the issue. That's without bringing up Meiko and Miku English voicebanks too.

IT tends to be complex, but overall... Meiko does win in terms of realism and often also by quality.

The biggest issue is... Meiko is subject to the problem of lacking a stand out vocal compared to Miku and there are a number of vocals who can do things either the same as her or better. Whereas Miku... Kinda has other cute vocals that can rival her, but stands out as there isn't too many who sound like her exactly. Meiko gets more attention for "being the first" of her group. when your the first, everyone is compared to you. Meiko's voice provider is a professional singer, their trained to sing in a certain way. That transfers into vocaloid, when a dozen singers into vocaloid with similar singing styles or tones and you get lots of similar voicebanks.

Honestly though, its hard both to accept a favourite vocal isn't as special of a snowflake as one thinks, but also that bias and pride can prevent one accepting things as fact. The whole "vocaloids sounding too similar" thing is something only starting to get fixed in V4 and is a fault of old recording styles used in V1-V3. IT reduced all singers to limited vocal styles and results on top of all other problems.