I'm not sure why you have ruled out the 740 lukitoh, but if it is because of the sounds and / or the styles, then it's quite possible that you would also rule out the PSR2000 as well if you try it. The 2000 is an improvement over the 740 in several areas, ( and in your case one of the criteria being a better vocal harmonizer ), but other than a few new voices and styles, the two boards don't sound a lot different. I may get some argument on that, but I owned both and that was my experience with them.

The PA80s VH can follow the chord structure of either the left hand chords or what is played with the right hand, depending on how you set it up.

The weak point of the PA80 for me is that there are only 2 fills per style, and there are a few styles that don;t have the best fills for all 4 variations. That being said though, most of the style variations consist of 8 bar loops and many of the variations have subtle fills in the 8th and sometimes 4th measure as well. There are plenty of styles available for both the PSR and PA series boards, and Korg recently released some new styles, some of which are very good.

I found that the 2000 is pretty much a wysiwyg board in that, if you like what it is "out of the box", great, because there isn't a lot you can do to change it. The PA80 allows for better voice editing, and it has some very good sounds to start with ( yes I've even managed to get a pretty good piano sound with the stock samples in the board ), It also allows for replacement of the factory styles. The PA80 seems to be a bit more difficult to understand at first for some of the players who have tried both ( me included ),but once I learned the OS I found it to be very well laid out and easy to navigate.

I'm not sure what the Ketron XD9 is going for ( DanO could answer that one ), but from what I've heard and seen of it, it's also certainly at least worth a look. I've only heard some demos, but they were good enough that the XD9 has gotten my attention and I am looking forward to trying one soon .

I agree that the midi setup is cumbersome and I wish that I could save more than one custom setup on the board, but then again, as was pointed out, saving my global setups to a floppy works fine as well. I'm not 100 % sure, because it has been awhile since I had the 2000, but I don't believe that there was any way to save custom midi setups in it at all.

AJ

[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 09-30-2002).]