I definitely don't agree about the consumption of polyphony on the JV/XP/XV units. As wilkes said, the sounds normally use two tones at most. Even with that, if you crave more polyphony, you can turn off a few tones in the sounds to get maximum productivity if you may.

As for the 128 Note Poly. in the newer XVs, it would help older JV/XP sequences as the XVs contain the old XP soundset. One could take advantage of the increase in polyphony. Personally, I wouldn't get an XV. I'm very happy with my XP60, which I got for $850 USD brand new in April.

I do agree however about the Sampling Issue. The older Ensoniq TS10s and MK61s have some sample ROM on board. While they can't sample themselves, the Flash ROM does extand the uselfulness of those machines when newer products come out.

The Trinity, Triton, Almost All Ensoniq keybaords, the Yamaha SYs and even the General Musics have this option. This is why I hope that Roland does release the Roland SRJV80-20 Sample ROM Expansion Board that I've been hearing about so much. Even if we were restricted to only Roland samples, then I could care less.

If that idea is still in development, one easy way that we could access new samples could be via a good utility such as the one that converts SYSEX files into .MID files. There could be one that converts RDAC or .WAV files to .MID files to send to the Sample ROM board.

The ealier XP50s had Flash ROM OSs so one could upgrade the synth's OS via Floppy. Just something to think about.

The new XVs may have a polyphony issue when talking about Velocity switching and using stereo tones. Mainly because when you stirke a chord, not every note you hit will be a the same velocity, so more tones infact will be consumed as you play.

The Infamous EPU.