I'm impressed with the initial reports of this arranger, but I guess the real deal will come if Korg decide to incorporate many of the PA800 new features in a new version of the PA1X, now getting a bit long in the tooth.

I guess we'll have to wait until they ship to find out the actual figures, but the though of a USB 2 equipped sampler has me all jazzed up. I've done a fair bit of work with the Triton sampler option, and found it to be pretty friendly about importing Akai keymaps, on the whole, and I LOVE how, after you've imported a keymap, you can easily replace the on-board keymap of a sound with the sample keymap, and this will take care of 75% of the voice programming too.

So, in other words, if you import an Akai format acoustic guitar, you replace the on-board acoustic guitar's keymap with the import, all the envelopes, LFO's velocity curves, and effects routings are already done, all that's left is a bit of tweaking (with any luck!) and you're done. Boo-yaaaaah!

Plus, I'm pretty impressed with the PA800's acoustic piano sound. First Korg other than dedicated piano 'boards that impressed me at all. Can't wait to hear the Purgatory Creek file though it..........