I agree. When I purchased the VA5 I stayed away from the VA7 because I didn't need the Variphrase feature, plus I had hoped that I could latter add on a zip drive. Now a couple of strange things that I've noticed on the VA5 is the disk operation does respond that Zip is not present when trying some of the preset disk links, which does tell me that the software is attempting to ping the IDE chain. Also a few months after I purchased the unit I was powering it up and it suddenly showed a waveform audio editing screen. After peeking around and looking at the manual I discovered that the variphraise editing feature is in the VA5. But I've never been able to access that part of the program again. Best that I can guess is Roland took the VA7 OS and rather than deleting certain sections just disabled them or made them hardware sensitive. Almost like the dongle software protection device used by some companies. If I was to make a purchase today I would probably take a look at the VA76. In fact when I purchased the VA5 the 76 was not supposed to be available in the US, but now it is. Oh well the march of technology goes on.