Thanks for the replies guys. I'm not totally convinced that I'm going to be a lot happier with the Fantom X, since it's predecessors did nothing for me soundwise, but there seems from the demo's to be some improvement there, and the OS is definitely better for me, so I'll surely give it a good workout when it's released.

Much like Jim says, the Motif ES has basically become a glorified midi controller for me, along with a housing for some excellent sounds ( the internal ones and the Plugins ). The problem of course is that I cannot rely on the ability of saving the edits to the plug in boards inside of the Motif itself, and the external editors do not allow me to access or modify the parameters of the Motif's internal effect units, so I cannot save my finished user voices in the external editor either. Well, actually, maybe I could, but I'd likely have to link the regular Motif ES software voice editor to the AN1x editor.. All that really is though is more steps again...

For this reason, although some great analog sounds can be made with it, The PLG-AN150 is basically useless to me ( not to mention it has a stingy 5 notes of polyphony ). The VL150 plug in has excellent presets, so very little modification is needed for what I do live with the breathe controller.

I already have some of the softsynths I want, and some of the others I've tried sound as good as almost any hardware analog modeling synths I've tried out there, maybe even the V synth. I will be getting a laptop with an aftermarket soundcard, so the softsynths will come with me wherever I go. I'm not sure that I will go the exact route that Jim is going, but something similar is definitely in order.

Tom, thanks for the info. If I do dump the ES, that might be the route I will go. It would have been so much easier though if Yamaha had just added Windows XP support for the SYXG100 software module, which already has the VL technology included. It worked very well on my old Windows ME computer. In fact, it sounded just as good as the PLG-VL150 inside of my Motif ES. I could have just added an external controller unit and have been done with Motif all together.

AJ