i have used the PAx1 quite a bit at home and in rehearsal. Its hard to answer your question in terms of the sampler load up times as it depends on the size of the samples that you are using.What you need is to look at what aspects of the sampler are important to you and then look at the competition. What other arranger keyboard has a fully functional sampler , able to read .WAV, AIFF, Korg and AKAI samples/multisamples,Where sampled sounds can be time sliced to create new grooves and kits, assigned to Sounds, or filtered, modified and processed by the internal effects ? But yes the keyboard is dead whilst samples are loading. However you can load up all the samples that you might need for a group of performance subject to the 32 meg limit. Like i said before if you can.Get into a shop and literally put the PAX through its paces and then compare it to what else is available on the market currently.