Take a look back with the search feature about the MS, Tony, and you will see that I was WAY ahead of you in skepticism about the MS. Something smelled wrong right from the start.

Mind you... how's that Audya?

However... I see a possible bright future for the Audya concept if they adopt high speed memory and SSHD's to stream the chunks. Basically, they crippled the concept because the hardware they decided to use could not stream enough, fast enough. That's why so few guitar chord choices and the failed idea of extending the basic chords with MIDI notes added in. But imagine a FULL set of chords now that SSHD's and fast RAM is affordable, imagine that they bothered to finish the damn thing and allow the USERS to create new styles easily from existing loop libraries, imagine they work at least as hard as Yamaha (and that's not very hard!) to bring out a constant stream of new, high quality styles (not relegated to only being usable by Mediterranean musicians!), and the Audya concept could be what we are looking for.

At least it is one of the few things out there that actually has a REAL arpeggiator built in (albeit stone age compared to the arpeggiators on a MoXF and the like) and key triggered phrases.

But sadly, it looks like the EU is too broke to innovate at the moment. But an SSHD equipped Audya is definitely the path to the future I would like to see happen.