Good going Graham. Ditto for me withn the PA80. I generally agree with everything that has been said here.

I think I'm "stuck" with the Motif ES and it's absolutely awful OS because I really like having the breathe controller along with the VL synthesis board in a unit that I can take out of the studio and play readily. The sampling function is so unintuitive that it's pretty much useles to me. The sequencer function is somewhat better, but geting inside some ofn the sub menus is a nightmare. However, the board sounds great, and it has a the breathe controller option, so it looks like it's staying here.

Since I'm going to be setting up a laptop for my softsynths anyway, had Yamaha and Sondius offered windows xp support for the SYxg-100 soft synth ( which includes their VL synthesis ), this wouldn't really be an issue, but like some of their other previous products, they orphaned it.

Korg has a real knack for putting out incomplete arrangers, and while the PA1x is probably a great machine, at it's price, it surely won't be replacing my PA80. I would have thought that the speaker version would have been a good bit less expensive than the "pro", given some of the feature disparity between the two, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.

Roland has no arrangers that interest me, ( though the V synth and Fantom X certainly do interest me ). Ketron and Gem have none that I don't have to drive many hours to see. So.. I'm probably outta the hardware race for quite some time, if not for goodd, or at least until my PA80 breaks down.

Unless..... I can find a way to implement a wind controller with a Fantom X, or a softsynth, but without physical modeling synthesis for the wind instruments, it would be pointless anyway. Tassman has a physical modeling software, but it pales in comparison to the VL150 plug in. The only other solution would be to find an inexpensive unit to house my VL150 plug in or find a used VL hardware module. I'm not sure what is available to that end, but I guess it's worth a look.

The PA80 is still more than sufficient for a "road" act. I don't absolutely need a PA1x or Tyros, and I'm not buying another mushy key PSR. I rarely use an arranger in the studio any more, and I don't need to spend hundreds / thousands on any hardware to improve a soundset, only to see my latest and greatest become old and obsolete in a year or two ( or less ).

If they want to keep me interested, make a Motif, a PA1 whatever, a Tyros, whatever... that can be upgraded to the next model ( not OS..next model ) via rom ( at a fair price of course ), so I don't have to go through the hassle of buying a board and selling it a year later when it becomes obsolete. When someone does that, then I'm interested again.

AJ

AJ