Thing is, Ian, Yamaha don't have to DROP the older kits to put new ones in. If much of Yamaha's current clientèle actually WANT the old, washed out sound, it would make little sense to do that.

But ADDING in newer kits (like they already did with a couple on the newer Yamaha's) simply opens up the door to the many here that won't look twice at a Yamaha because of the insipid drum sound.

Audio styles need to either go the whole hog, like Ketron have, or just not bother at all. I think Yamaha are starting to realize the expense of the feature. It's not like hundreds of new audio styles have magically appeared for sale (lot more expensive to hire a great drummer and a studio full of expensive mikes to capture a great drum track than to farm it out to some style creator with a T4 in his bedroom!), and that's the only way the feature was ever going to take off...

It seems strange to have incorporated the ability to load in some more audio tracks, then fail to support it in any meaningful way. But this is Yamaha's modus operandi, overall. Employ a proprietary format for samplers and other audio features, make sure the user can't make their own, then dole out new sounds and grooves miserly, and expensively.

The features sure SEEM like a good idea when you are buying one, but if you dig deeper into how poorly Yamaha have supported their own proprietary formats, you realize what a waste of time they are. If Yamaha were serious about allowing their users to utilize these new capabilities, they would open them up to common formats and allow the user to create their OWN styles and sample sets. What's the POINT of a 2GB sample size for the T4 sampler, when so little is available for it? I wouldn't be surprised if all the official Yamaha soundsets for T4 combined didn't even fill that up!

In the end, capability is only as good as available CONTENT...