The VIRUS b is the successor to the original Virus.

Please click on the image to see a 250K close-up. Thank you very much! to Daniel Kleczynski <dklecz@post.pl> for sending me the picture of his brandnew Virus b. (I know if I had a new Virus b, I would certainly do other things than take a picture of it, so that deserves an extra thank you!)

The Virus b is (most likely) little more than the rack version of the kb.

First stores list the VIRUS b on their online shops and the price seems to be about 2900 DM (about 1450 EURO), thus a little more than the first Virus, still considerably less than the 3300 street price of the VIRUS kb.

Rest assured that I will put up pictures and more detailled information as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Meanwhile: here is more about the VIRUS kb, the keyboard version of the VIRUS b.

The differences:

If you look closely you'll see wuite a number of differences between the Virus and the Virus b.

The font changed a bit, so did the shapes of the red shapes around the synth's sections.

LFO:
The LFOs now start with a sinewave, then there are three other waves (triangle, sawtooth and pulse), then you go directly to the menu where you can select Sample&Glide, Sample&Hold and the other 64 waves that are also used by the Oscillators.

Instead of the "key follow" or key trigger button, both LFOs now have an "edit"button that gets you directly to the LFO's menus.

OSC:
Not much changed here, except for the FilterEnvMod button which is gone, the sync button is in its place now and the other button became an Edit button again. This gets you directly to the Edit menu to the OSC pages.

Mixer:
in the mixer section the OSC Volume button is finally labelled correctly: -6...0...6, where the positive side (from 0...6) is labelled "Saturation"

Display Area:
Next to the display there is a third pair of up/down buttons. This lets you switch parts no matter where you are in the menus. Good feature and overdue!

Below the display the Store buton became black, a new button "Effects" appeared (why a button for the ol' Chorus and Delay? Does this mean anything??). the buttons for Multi and Single are a bit further away from the other buttons to seperate them visually.

Filter:
just a little change in the filter section, the Saturation button becomes the section's edit button, so I guess the Filter Edit menu will elt you set the saturation now.

General:
There are three MIDI ports now, all Edit buttons have an LED next to them and I believe the regular knobs are still used in spite of the prototypes shown at Frankfurt Musikmesse. Maybe the new-style knobs are reserved for the keyboard version.