Hi Lindoz, long time no see, good to see you back. How's the motif?
Were you there on the public days?

We shall see about the 7000 when we get our hands on it. However there are a few things you must have misunderstood, or you talked to the wrong people.

The 7000 is 128 note poly, and does retain the disk drive.

The sx6 gives you various combinations of bass, accomp and drums output for external mixing/dsp etc. The sub out on the 7000, as I understood it, is the output of the sub-woofer only. So on stage you can get away with smaller left and right speakers and only one bass box, for the same quality/loudness, or keep the existing setup and have the option of bass enhancement too.

As I understood it there is quite a difference in the usb. The sx6 usb is meant to only mimic the parallel functionality and transfer/edit data to the pc.

The 7000 usb, will obviously also do this but goes much further, as I understand it by transfering digital wave audio to the pc, among other things. Assuming that the 7000 has independant dsp for microphone and line in, that means you could balance a vocalist and electric guitar with the voices of the 7000, play the wave file directly into your laptop and pc, and make an audio cd straight away (or an MP3 or WMA with the technics software).

It seems to me that with no analogue stage needed in the process, the big advantage of this is that the quality of the audio cd is totally independant of the quality of the analogue to digital converters in your pc soundcard. It does not matter if you have a $10 soundcard or a $1000 soundcard since only wave audio data is being transfered.

Once in the pc you can equalise/compress/dsp the file easily with Sound Forge or Goldwave, again with no degradation in the audio. To me, this is a very useful step forward.

I agree about the soloists, naturally everyone will make their own mind up if a particular set of voices, styles or features justifies changing, as I said before, we shall have to see.