I'm not sure if this is the right way to ask this, but I'll give it a shot.

A Creative soundcard has a synth A and a Synth B (ignoring the onboard midi
synth will sounds) to which you can assign midi banks/patches. As I
understand it, each synth has 16 channels, giving you a total of 32 channels
and various tracks can be assigned to each channel so that if you have
patches that are mapped to different areas of the keyboard, you could assign
multiple patches to the same channel without them stepping on each other.

Are all midi synths set up essentially this way? Are you always limited to
16 channels per synth? Creative cards have 2 synths, is there anything that
has more than 2 synths so you have more than 32 potential channels?

What about Gigastudio? How does its structure compare to this? Similar?
Totally different animal? How about others like Halion?

Thanks.