That’s the result of a few years of tweaking the factory styles between the launches of the BK9 and the EA7… I definitely got the impression that Roland leaves creating or tweaking the styles until preproduction keyboards are available for the style team, and by that point the sales division is screaming for them to finish so they can start selling them..!

I’ve already alluded to how not one single BK9 style uses more than one kit, and I think you are hearing the results of just a bit more time spent EQ-ing and balancing the styles than Roland gave the BK9. A company more committed to making arrangers might have brought out an update that replaced the original ROM styles with those tweaked for the EA7, but so much about the last two Roland ‘pro’ arrangers seems half finished.

On the BK9 there were plans for expansion ROM sounds that never got designed into even the motherboard (there are no expansion slots á la G70), and zero factory content for the Key Audio feature (which would have made for an excellent substitute for no multipads). Not to mention, no way to Link Chord Sequences to Performances or Link .jpg’s to Performances (for sheet music display on a connected monitor), relegating both those features to disuse (if you can’t bring up everything you need in one go, it’s no use live!).

On the EA7, 128MB (that’s not a typo!) of RAM for the sampler is almost useless in these days of multi-GB sized RAM on Yamaha’s and Korg’s. And once again, no factory audio multipads and no way to take SMF’s and import them to multipads (basically rendering it only useful with the ROM multipads).

It just felt like Roland no longer cared (G70 got quite a massive update in v2.0) enough to fix the launch shortcomings. And given that Roland basically bailed on the entire segment after the EA7, I think there’s a good case for this being true!