I have heard from someone else before that they could notice timing discrepencies even playing anything over 2 notes at the same time! All i can relate to this is that the 2080 never sounded right to me, it seemed to have an uneven feel to it. I think Roland thought that no one would notice, but hey, its so bad sometimes, who wouldnt.

With regards to the 5080, i cant comment too much as Ive only had it a week or so, but i did chuck a very dense sequence at it the other day and it does sound better. However I have noticed 1 thing. Roland have put a "feature" in performance mode called phase lock, which the manual describes as, when you have lots of differerent channels playing at same time midi cant send it fast enough. What it does is delays all parts on the same channel so it can trigger them exactly at the same time. Fair enough! However this isnt all true as I layed up a patch with 8 tones and copyed it to 8 parts in a performance. In theory there should not be a delay because i was only pressing 1 note rather than sending 128 down the wire. But it sloppily triggerer 128 sounds at once, which brings me to think Roland push their hardware right up to the limit, and over to get the specs up.

As I said i am not as bothered as before about this as the 5080 does play much better IMHO, and i bought it knowing about the previous problems, I just couldnt bear to be without that JV/XV sound i suppose!!