Well, finally I had the chance to test the new XD9 for about 3 hours at the portuguese distributor. They were nice in leting me "burn their ears" at the store. I brought the manual with me, so I could have a guided try of the several new features. I will skip all things you can learn in the manual or in the specification sheet.

Ketron strategy for this new keyboard seems clear to me: to produce a very attractive priced keyboard based in the same technology used in their X series and SD1, intended to please live users. The quality of the sounds and styles has the same excellent standards present on the X/SD instruments. I can not notice a clear difference in quality between the XD9 and the SD1, despite the different size of the samples. The grand piano is great, nothing to do with X1 piano sample. There are a lot of new styles (other are "old styles renamed): I liked very much some of them. There is a "new" (to the X series) set of jazz & swing styles (that I would use a lot), and a strong Pop & Funk set of styles (less important to me), some new latin styles.

In my opinion, the best things in this keyboard (apart from the price) are the - much better - manual (AJ "fingerprints" ) and the new features. There are surely many others, but here there are some of the ones that I tested:

- Bassist: great new feature allowing to create new bass lines, that I would love to include in my playing style.
- Drum remix (playing a style along with a midi file): interesting but a bit strange, as the style used in the mix naturally doesn't follow the volume variations and all the dynamics of the songs. Anyway, it should give good results in some tunes "less rich" variations of rhythm and volume.
- Morphing - allows you to control between two voices used in a sound, with the modulation wheel - very nice.
- Rearrange of pattern location in the memory: very hady. All the Ketron users will like this one. It saves users a lot if time.
- Rootless chord recognition - this one is for Scott Even if doesn't include all the possibilities, it's an important step for Ketron that will please jazz players.

I don't miss the sequencer or the sampler (rarely use them on my X4; not so important for the live player), but I miss the stereo line input (that I use all the time to connect a laptop). Users also have reasons to miss the balanced XLR mic input introduced with the SD1 (would it be so difficult/pricy to keep it in the XD9?).

In conclusion: it's not really an instrument with new concepts (like the X1 was), but more like a best-of-ketron-in-an-attractive-priced-package homogeneous keyboard, with some great new features that will please the live user and a good manual (that apparently is not beeing shiped with each instrument; only available online).

One last note: I was told by my dealer that the X series hard disks will NOT WORK on the XD9. SD1 hard disks will WORK IF formatted, once installed in the XD9. The X series voalizers are fully compatible with the new model. AJ, please correct me in case I'm wrong. The module (XD3) will reach the distributors by the end of the summer.

-- José.