Has some great sounds. Many of the other sounds are mediocre. I demo'd the S88 and S for over an hour just to get a feel for the board and its sounds. Sounds are subjective of course, ie., what I thought was good or bad may be the reverse for someone else. One of the biggest complaints of the FantomS/88 is the note drop off from lack of Polyphony. Roland has up to 8 Voice Layers on some of its sounds so theoretically with all voices enabled, ie., Main, Layer1, Layer2, Left, Pads, etc., you could start to cut out by pressing down just 4 Keys simultaneously because the S/88 has only 64 note Polyphony.

Another big complaint is that the Sampler does not correctly play back Samples that have been recorded to it sometimes. So you record something into the Sampler and sometimes it doesn't play it back the way you sampled it.

Something along this line; you sample in Mozart and in the Playback you might get Chopstix. I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea. Maybe a bug fix is in the works that will correct this oddity.

I think Roland rushed this product to the market while making their customers the "Beta" testers. There have been reports of the OS freezing up and other buggy stuff.

Also when Yamaha announced the Motif ES series, the FantomS/88 became obsolete IMO, probably even before that fact. Many of the people that bought the FantomS/88 complained that the sounds were no where near as good as the sounds on the original Motif or Triton Studio and returned it because of that enormous shortcoming. Now that the Motif ES is on the way, the FantomS/88 sound descrepancy will be even more apparent and disparaging IMO. Remember, the Motif ES now has "True" 128 note Polyphony (which simply means that all of the waveforms in the keyboard are available to all 128 notes. The Motif ES will also take the PLG cards which can increase the Polyphony further).

The Motif ES has 175 mega bytes of WAV ROM which is more than any other Workstation on the market. Plus the Mega Voices, plus all those other discrete and highly accurate sampled AWM2 Wave Form Voices, plus the Mo' Sampler's massive storage capability. PS: People have said the FantomS/88's Grand Piano was nothing to write home about.- (The Grand Piano is tweakable, but out of the box it is apparently nothing special, and I concur with that sentiment although I thought it wasn't bad. IMO they will not be able to say that about the Motif ES's Grand Piano. I have heard the demo's and the Motif ES has THEE best Grand Piano sample I have EVER heard on ANY Keyboard. Now if the Motif ES's Grand Piano MP3 demo has any inkling to the real thing ie.,- (Mo' in the flesh ), it will not only be something to write home about but you might want to also consider purchasing some Yamaha stock options.

Best regards,
Mike

PS: Terry I realize you probably know all the details about the new Mo ES but for those that read this post and didn't know, I added it for their benefit.

[This message has been edited by Idatrod (edited 08-17-2003).]