I recently exchanged my VA7 for a Tyros(got it yesterday)For me the best features of the VA7 were the sounds,the polyphony and the style morphing feature.I really liked the way that you could switch to a different drum beat on the fly with the touch of a screne in the middly of a song.I ended up not preferring a touch screne for on the fly changes in an arrangement and often had to also use buttons as well-I would have got the hang of it with practice.I was dissappointed in the absence of an event editor so my mistakes had to be fixed up by punching in and out the affected bars and re-recording these bits.However the final disappiontment was the variphrase.More than half of the 10 or so wav files I encoded in it got distortions of various degrees.And the few that did work had a noticable loss of sound quality.I sent the VA7 back to the Roland service dept and they took a month to look at it before concluding that everything worked properly.So it was that variphrase couldn't handle the files I put into it.The files were complex pad sounds and choirs voices.anyway I am much happier with the responsiveness of the Tyros.I guess I am a button man rather than a touch screne man-but you don't find this out without trying out the alternatives.