Mike,
Some good points all around. However after having it for two days it does not seem likely at this point that I will return the S88. Having had a Motif 7 before, I have a pretty good feel what the ES will be.

While the ES has better specs than the S88 does, I'm not sure that makes much of a difference for the way I work and record.

As far as sound comparison, here's what I will say so far having not been through all the patches yet.

The Roland AC pianos take a back seat to no-one IMO. Their acoustic concert grand has this very cool feature where I can open the lid in increments for different tonal qualities.

The electrics are also outstanding some great Rhodes patches.

The strings are superb!

Brass very good to excellent.

Synthy sounds great and mediocre depending on the patch.

The weak patches I think so far are the acoustic guitars. I do not care for them much at all.

The drum kits are excellent.

The user interface is 100 times better than the Motif was. Very easy and intuitive to find my way around.

The larger screen a huge +. BTW nice about the new eye surgery, but useless to me.

To sum up at this point, why I think the S88 works better for me than the Mo did or the ES would.

Larger screen.

Different voices palette, for more variety in my work. I did buy the world sounds expansion board with it that has some outstanding world percussion. I had a couple of the Yamaha expansion boards and did not like theirs or Korgs for that matter.

The user friendliness another huge +.

The arppegiator works great and easily manipulateable for variety.

The Dynamics pads that I can play real time are outstanding, for drums and dropping in phrases etc.

All in all though still new I am very happy with it. I played the Mo again while I was there and liked the Fantom better for my work and method.
Terry

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jam on,
Terry http://imjazzed.homestead.com/Index.html

[This message has been edited by trtjazz (edited 08-18-2003).]