I believe I said the same thing here when I first heard the new Atelier demos. I could close my eyes and basically imagine that a G70 was playing, other than those SA type voices, which, as my friend Ian points out, failed to impress compared to Yamaha's...

Bill, other than the new SA type voices, what about the new Atelier voice technology is new in any way? As close to the G70 as the demos sounded, and with the E80 at least being more advanced than the G70 in some ways, I find it hard to believe that the TOTL E series sounded 'old' in any way other than perhaps those SA voices. Perhaps the E merely suffered from not as impressive a sound system as the Atelier's?

I am also curious about your Ketron remarks. You say the audio styles don't really stick out like a sore thumb... Would it be fair to say that perhaps the price premium that this feature has imposed on the Audya hasn't really improved it markedly over what can be achieved without all that extra stuff, then?

Oh, and last thing... to quote you: For the first time I can safely say that an upgrade from previous models is worth every penny, wasn't the upgrade to OS2 free? Value for money indeed!

Thanks for the review. Shame there is nothing comparable over here...