Hi All! I tried both the Latin and Country boards today- here are my comments/criticism/priases!!

LATIN- The trumpets have WAY TOO MUCH VIBRATO- come on Roland- if we won't this much vibrato we can program it ourselves- it's way overdone. The solo trumpet programs are not bad at all though. As a matter of fact the brass is mainly quite well done and for anyone craving alot of new brass sounds, this is the board for you!!!!! I also quite liked the nylon guitars but really they aren't as good as the guitars on offer in a Stock XV synthe (not JV!). For JV owners, the Latin board is a must if you want better acoustic guitar sounds though. The loops are all a big waste of time. They are gimmicky and really better use could be made of the ROM here!!!!!! Come on Roland how many times will we be able to use these loops- they are chord progressions in popular latin styles that got on my nerves within 2 minutes of hearing them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The accordians are crap as are the salsa pianos- I play accordian and no synthe has ever made a good accordian sound IMHO- it's impossible to effectively mimic bellow action etc from a synthe keyboard!!!!

COUNTRY- the acoustic guitars sorry to say are a bit of a letdown. They are definetly better than those stock guitars in the JV's but not as good as the XV acoustic guitars IMHO. They more or less sound like differently programmed variations of the same few samples. The clean tele patches are not bad in a mix but don't really cut it in a solo situation. As far as I'm concerned- Korg has the electric guitars covered in the Trinity/Triton instruments. As a matter of fact, I even prefer the Triton/Trinity's acoustic guitars also. I found that the loops in the A Guitar samples were too short but again this is just my opinion. The electric basses are VERY USEABLE on this board however- I really enjoyed playing them. The drums are dissapointing and nothing really better than what's already on offer in a stock JV. I loved the banjo's, mandolins (especially the tremelo ones) and the bazouki patches- well done and the only way to go if you really want these kind of patches. Again the accordians were nothing to write home about but better than the ones in the Latin board. Here again, I wish Roland would just can the idea of giving us these useless 'loops' that we can't/don't want to use!!!!!!!! My opinion again obviously.

All in all, as an XV3080 owner, I wouldn't bother with these boards. But if I owned a JV2080 which has room for 8 boards and IMHO hasn't got as good guitar and brass samples/patches as the XV instruments, I would consider these boards. Of the 2 boards, if I could only choose 1, I'd go the latin board because of the brass. But I'm not going to buy neither!

Instead, I'll wait for the 'house' board to come out and fill up my last remaining 'slot' in my XV3080 that way!!!!!

Cheers.