Diki,

If you look at this thread, I was the only one who posted something negative about Roland, which, as you know, I do own. In fact, I believe that the main beneficiaries of this thread, and the many well-articulated opinions, are those competitors lagging behind Yamaha.

This consistency is a great feature of Yamaha product line. The user moving from PSR 2000 to 2100 to 3000 can be pretty sure that the newer instrument will have all the features he liked about his old board and then some. Ditto for transitioning from T1 to T2.

How cool would it be if Roland had retained the Super Tones page from the VA- series? or the smooth scrolling in the list of songs/styles, that they have had in the G's? or the style morphing? How about being unable to control tempo with the alpha wheel when a page other than main is displayed? Or the chord sequencer, that they have had forever, but then suddenly decided to drop? Yet in their relentless pursuit of cost savings, they replace the buttons with the touch screen, then bring back the buttons, but not all, (e.g. fills)?

To me this is one of the great conundrums that Roland would drop functions that many users found valuable, or at least gotten used to. The purpose of this was, what? to confuse and exasperate their loyal devotees?

I can somewhat uderstand taking creative liberties when it comes to implementing new functions, although having the audio subsystem and the removable storage, why not implement the MP3 playback? Why not be daring and implement the MP3 playback with the VariPhrase capabilities? Wouldn't that be cool? How about MP3 with VariPhrase and synching to style? That would have been too innovative for them. But why drop the functions which used to work before? How do they decide what people use and what they don't? Were any of you ever asked? I sure as heck was not.

Which brings back my concern about customer support. I can pick up the phone and call Roland tech support in the US, but beyond some simple advice, they have to go to Roland Italy for answers, and those answers do not seem to be coming.

I do think that Yamaha is doing a better job designing, marketing, and supporting their keyboards, than, say, Roland. For the sake of all of us Roland users, I hope that Roland will do things as well as Yamaha does, and maybe even better (some wishful thinking here).

Regards,
Alex