I think altogether too many musicians make their decision about overall ‘sound’ WHILE THEY ARE PLAYING. This, IMHO, is a terrible idea.

Your attention is split between too utterly different functions. Listening, and playing. If you want to decide about overall sound, carefully record (.wav only, please!) the arranger while you play, hopefully do the same with your old arranger.

Then sit back, relax, have some quiet time (give yourself an hour to ‘clear’ your hearing), make sure utter silence around you, and then play the files back to back (put your audio player into ‘random’ mode, so you don’t know which one is playing!) and then spend 30 minutes doing NOTHING but listen…

This makes for a good ‘apples to apples’ comparison.

Obviously, features, new sounds, new effects, yeah, you want to actually PLAY them to see how they feel under the fingers. But try to record while you do this (if in a store, use a little picket digital recorder) and once again, listen after time to relax.

You can hear details you completely miss while you’re playing…