Dear all, thank you so much for all of the replies, they really helped me today in checking out the things that you said. I spent two hours playing the G70 and Pa1X and here are my conclusions.

Firstly the G70. At times very intuitive and at others frustrating until you work out how to do things. Some nice touches such as the draw bars for tweaking sounds and the organ mode. Some of the piano sounds were ok and the organs were great. On the downside some of the features did not work as expected. The Decay slider in the amplifier envelope has little or no effect and this seriously hampers you. Also the amp filter does not work like a normal amp filter. You should get no sound with attack, decay and release at zero but there is a constant sustain that you do not have access to - not good. The main thing those was the quality of the voices, especially the synth voices. I uswed to have many vintage synths such as minimoog, Jupiter 6, Arp Axxe, MKS80, etc etc and I have to say that Roland have played it very safe and gone for inoffensive sounds. they do not sound very authentic at all. Very disappointing. The styles were ok but I ws not set alight. The SRX board cannot be used in the styles at present but can with OS 2 but there is no guarantee that it will work well. I would not pay £700 for this board let alone the £2400 that it is selling for in the UK.

On to the Korg PA1X. WOW! Deep synth programming and very convincing sounds. Very, very surprised as I have always been a Roland man since 1985. The styles were ok and seemed to have more variation than the Roland ones. I particularly liked the dedicated octave switches and fill in switches, also that each time you select a voice the editing screen automatically opens. There were other things as well that I liked but cannot remember them. The downside was that the sliders were not up to the Roland quality in feel and usage.

In short the Korg won quite easily. I have been using a Roland MC909 and now that I am set on the Korg will see if this is still valid or if the MC909 will go up for sale. At £2500 for the PA1XPro it is a hell of a lot of money. More than I think it is worth. I think that it is worth £2000 on a comparative basis with other pro audio gear. So do I go for a PA80 instead or just try and get a PA1XPro second hand? I will open another thread.

many thanks again for the very helpful advice.