V1 English vocaloids were better than v2. I actually like v2 => v5 I think it fixes a lot of the problems. I wish Avannas male counter part came out. Also wish we got a better English bank for yohioloid instead of Japanese.
I back that for Leon and Miriam, but Lola is a problem child who likes to mispronounce things, go silent on seemingly-normal phoneme combinations, and outright ignores a lot of the quick fixes that work well on Leon (such as a general small blanket of like 70 Noise bringing out his z's. You have to crank it up to like 90-100 in tiny spurts to get Lola to say them). The quality difference between Leon and Lola, for having been released at the same time, blows my mind. And of course, Miriam is just a queen no matter what. She doesn't even really need Noise like the other V1's I've used, she's just very nice and clear all around.
Agreed that V2s sound lovely in V5, except that I've only heard Miku, Piko, Tonio, and Al in it so that's not a great sample size.
Seconded that Hio's English bank is a little bit of a disappointment compared to Yohio's English singing. But I suppose breaking the language down to its bare phonemes will bring out pronunciation errors. It's also somewhat weak. I still love him though, I'mma still buy him...
@DefiantKitsune big agree that Prima is difficult to work with outside her intended use. In opera, she's gorgeous and almost ethereal. I definitely think Sonika is harder to work with, if only because getting understandable English out of her even within her intended genre, with a tone that doesn't grate on the ears, is really difficult, but that's just personal bias perhaps. Prima and Tonio also both have a strange thing where their aspirated and un-aspirated consonants appear to be switched, as well, so that the default [t s] etc combos sound quite choppy, whereas if you change it to [th s] (etc) it sounds natural. So if the user isn't the type to spend a couple hours fiddling exclusively with phonemes, the result won't be as intuitive to a native listener, most likely. PFX's banks don't appear to have this issue AFAIK (but I still hold to it that any English bank needs extensive phoneme editing. The language is just a pain that way :'> )