I saw this demoed at NAMM and was very impressed for the $499 street price. I think Casio will do well with this. They had none available to actually play so I didn't get to feel the unweighted key action. The VA synth engine is monophonic and can be used to process external audio sources. I just wish it had some polyphony, the Casio CZ series at least had 4 note polyphony ... oh well. The PCM wave engine ( Hex mode ) is polyphonic. They didn't demo the XW-G1 which is aimed more at the DJ community which has the same solo synth engine but trades the PCM engine for a sampler and sample looping. It has flash memory for the samples.