My flabber is extremely ghasted at the thought that this DOESN'T have a touch screen. Once used to them, the offer a degree of control and flexible layout that transcends the Yamaha inspired design.

No, of course, you still leave the majority of live controls in button and slider format... but offset buttons for onscreen functions has always been a major problem live (your eye tends to go where the screen says it should go), and doesn't allow for anywhere NEAR the density of information on one screen that a touch screen allows. Five buttons vertically, five buttons horizontally... That's not a lot of selectable information on one page. Probably means a LOT of paging around...

I think we are all missing the point as well... although there ARE workarounds for the USB placement, if kludgey and potentially damaging, the more important question should be... 'What kind of drugs were the designers ON? ' And what other bonehead ergonomic issues lie in waiting..? The front panel layout pretty much flies in the face of almost every other arranger out there. I guess everybody ELSE got it wrong, huh?

As much as I take issue with Mike for his fixation with USB2 (especially on arrangers that have NO high speed data needs), I must confess that here, with a sampler and live streaming drum loops, MP3 and Wav file playback, not having this is a real time waster. I don't see the need for it live (samples and loops will already be on your drive, and it ought to play MP3's and Wav's directly, no loading), but at home, you are quite likely to be doing close to GB sized transfers fairly often (as you audition drum loop libraries or sampler loads). Here, I agree. This thing is going to be a pig at home, loading up the HD... One can only hope that at least it multitasks, and you can get some work done while it slowly loads data to the HD...

There's too much stuff on the left side. I'm sorry, but without a Chord Sequence, who of us has much time for button pushing while our LH is tied up playing the damn chords? There are some pretty important controls there, that other arrangers place in the middle or right side. I envision a lot of having to stretch over to the left side with our RH's (and recall seeing quite a bit of that at trade show videos).

Does anyone designing for Ketron actually PLAY? I find it hard to imagine they do...

Finally, I have a big apology to make. (It happens! ). I really didn't think Frank would be as critical as he has been, with these things so hard to get and show (ask George!). He has proven me completely wrong, and my level of respect and admiration has gone up a BIG notch... I only hope that the fanboys that have taken me to task for articulating this level of criticism cut him just a LITTLE more slack than me!

Can't wait for the audio... I know it will be spectacular.

Thanks for the video, Frank.