Thanks again for the info and tips guys!

I had a chance to listen to some of the soft synth demo songs and play around with the demo versions of Absynth, Ableton Live and a coupld of others. Well, the sounds are definately very impressive and there seem to be many more options for tweaking than on a stand-alone unit like the Juno-G or Fantom-Xa. The trouble is, there are so many features on these soft synths, they're pretty freakin intimidating, and of course, all of the best ones seem to cost around $500.

For me... already spending 10 hours a day on the computer... I just don't think I can stomach the major extra time investment to learn this software and then the contstant time required in making that my main music source.

From what I can see, you're right that using the software is ultimately the way to enable creation of professional standard sounds. The thing is, while I want good sound quality, I do not have dilusions of producing a studio-quality CD any time soon.

So, I suppose I will end up going with a stand-alone keyboard and a groovebox for the time being. This is what is appealing to me and that's got to be one of my main concerns at this point. Either way I do it, I'm going to drop $1,500+ so I figure I want to give myself the best chance of having fun and staying interested. At this point, I just don't think that's possible if I have to spend the majority of my time mousing around the computer screen and not actually playing and tweaking on the keyboard. It's just my preference at this point.

So, my primary concern is getting good quality equipment first, then if my interest continues to grow, I can always invest in soft synths later on... right?

My dillema now is... the Juno-G or the Fantom-Xa. The only diff I see is that the G offers 4 channels of audio in and the Xa offers skip-back sampling. I think you guys said that the sampling feature would be preferable for dance music, but can't the audio in on the Juno essentially be used to accomplish sampling? Again, I'm not nearly an expert yet, but I thought that I heard or read that somewhere.

Anyway, thanks again for your continued help!