I find trying new keyboards a lot like tasting a new wine...... some of them come on strong the minute you pop them in your mouth, some of them develop more slowly, and require more time to be appreciated.

I've seen many posts about out of the box impressions, and then I've read several posts about arrangers that grew on the poster more slowly. To be honest, I tend to prefer the ones that take a bit more time to appreciate, rather than overwhelm on the first sip.

Sometimes, having a keyboard that demands a fair bit of setup time and adjustment helps you to learn and improve your programming skills more than those that pop right out of the box and you just sit there and play (nice though that is, it makes having an individual sound so much harder!) and never spend much time with the innards......

Every time I change keyboards, I'm looking for something that DOESN'T sound too much like the previous one, If I wanted to sound as good as my last one, I'd still be playing it! My pet peeve is that even the manufacturers have a blinkered idea of how to use an arranger..... they don't HAVE to be played in simple LH - chords, RH - melody mode, but often simple mistakes in button placement make two-handed control a lot harder.

Many members here bemoan how small the arranger market (and consequent development and innovation are, also), but the manufacturers themselves do a lot to deliberately hobble their performance by taking too narrow a view of their potential usage. The gap between workstation and arranger has never been so small, sonically, and Yamaha's T2 even has voices and technology above and beyond their top-of-the-line MotifES (as they should, given the price!), but control layout still makes them all difficult to do much with your right hand. Some of us use BOTH........!

If only we spent more time on this forum saying what we would like to see improved/changed/undone rather than constant self-congratulation, perhaps the manufacturers would spend more time and R&D budget on making them more useful and well rounded. Right now, they must think they are close to perfect, for all the innovation they fail to come up with each product cycle.

Only the soft-arrangers are showing any real changes in control flexibility and expanded feature sets, but unfortunately the hardware and sound development lags a bit. However, soon (I think within 2-3 years) this will change, and the big boys are going to have to play catchup, not something the market is kind to.....

Anyway, thanks for a post that considers more than just what arranger you own......