I have been looking at the Ion, it's a very cool little instrument, very solidly built. The biggest problem seems to be the tendancy for some Ions to spontaneously go into edit mode. Apparently some have rotary encoders that are very, very sensative. Software upgrade 1.05 (released in Feb. 04) was supposed to reduce the problem, but some owners have had to send their Ion's back to Alesis. The Ion User Group on Yahoo has had a lot of discussion of the problem, useful and otherwise. It still sounds like a great machine to me.