Robbo... Even though Ketron have leveraged audio drums for much longer, and have got it just about right (sliced drum grooves, not timestretched, right?), I still believe it to be a flawed system.

Once you accept that sampled drum KITS can be as good as an audio groove (as long as matched to a MIDI file that is of high quality playing), really, there's almost no advantage to audio drums, and many, many disadvantages. First and foremost is, on my G70 and most other MIDI arrangers, if I want to take a style and soften it a bit, it's a piece of cake to substitute a brush kit for a rock kit, change the bass to an upright and the guitars to acoustics, and now the style is reborn! You can't do that with audio styles.

If I want more reverb (or less) on the snare, piece of cake. If I need to edit the kick pattern to better suit a particular song, no problem!

With how much better MIDI drum kits are sounding (thank God the trend is starting to go away from bone dry closed mikes drum sounds!), as long as matched to tasty playing, the slight advantage that an audio recording gives you doesn't outweigh its disadvantages, IMHO.

Sample ROM sizes are starting to increase at an excellent pace on arrangers and WS's, getting up close to the GB size. And the Kronos is showing the way to remove that limit completely by streaming samples live from an SSD. All I am saying is that, if mated to much better drum KITS, mere MIDI drumming can come VERY close to live (and some fairly small ROM size arrangers like the Korg's and Roland's already do an excellent job - imagine what they could do with larger kits!), opening out our options exponentially.

There' a world of older styles out there that, if played through a great MIDI kit, could have a whole new lease on life. Audio styles, they are what they are. MIDI styles, they are what you make of them!