I guess I'll throw my hat into the ring here. I stumbled across a PMA-5 up for auction on eBay about 10 months ago and won it for half the going street price (at the time). I love it! I do admit the MIDI-IN jack gives me trouble at times, if it's not angled down, notes tend to get lost or stick.

I've seen the debates everywhere on the PMA-5 vs the QY-70 (that's the one, right?) and I like what's been discussed here. Basically, they're different enough to be in different categories. To the PMA-5 credit, it is jam-loaded with tweakable stuff from Sysex that you'd never know existed unless you dug into the manual. But it's got filters, LFOs for automatic sweeps and vibratos, plus the Chours and Reverb are completely manipulatable. The seven choices given in the PMA's interface are simply macros to set the internal settings. The QY scores points for being able to enter Sysex right from the unit. I never opened up the nifty abilities of my PMA until I got it hooked to Cakewalk.

What else can I say? It makes a great sketchpad, as Cinda said. When I'm on the go or don't feel like sitting down at my computer, I can just 'jot' something down on the PMA, play around with it a little and then eventually dump it to Cakewalk and flesh it out more. I wrote half a song on a plane trip to see a friend, then finished up the song lying on her apartment floor. Not bad!

And my AX-1 (also had from eBay) is a wonderful companion to it. All in all, I'm really happy with it, it makes a great GM/GS module for my computer (for those 'older' games that still use MIDI music) and there's just something about pulling out this book-sized thing in public, whipping out the stylus and a set of headphones, and then writing music while other people try to figure out what exactly you're up to.

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