Roel,

I wanted to reply to your message in Frankie's thread, but then realized that it belongs here.

I am sorry to read about your (mis)adventures with G70. It has put a damper on my excitement about it as well. Reading your comments about stale sounds makes me wonder where what did they use the 192 MB of sound ROM for.

Having said that, sound is a very subjective thing. There are people who like Korg sound, but to my ears it has always been a bit too harsh and unpolished, more suited for hip-hop rave party than a fancy dinner-dance affair (but that's just my two ears' perception).

The SD1 is indeed a very nice instrument. The Ketron styles are generally much more elaborate than Roland and Yamaha's are, and I fully expected that Roland styles maintain their understated elegance. It is regrettable that Roland did not seem to put in the programming effort into the much heralded 6 fills.

I am pretty certain that there will be an OS update (or a few) which will fix the crashes fairly quickly, probably within the month. Roland is pretty good in getting the stability issues resolved. OS enhancements are a totally different matter - while smaller manufacturers, like Ketron and GEM on occasion will issue an OS update which will give users some new and very desirable functions, Roland has no history of doing that. On the other hand, by spending resources on functional enhancements, they often have to push back work on stability issues, which can (and do if one to believe the Ketron forum here) adversely affect their current customers.

I think that with any instrument there is a trade-off, especially with a complex one like an arranger. There is not a single one which has all the best sounds, styles, ergonomics and ease of use, size and weight, other features like MIDI/MP3 playback and vocal harmonizer, high polyphony, good size and quality keyboard (I need 76 keys), reliability, user support, and competitive price.

At this point my 6 year old G1000 still works for me, and sounds very satisfying. I do not enjoy its lack of user-friendliness, and the small screen size is really hard on my eyes. The fact that it has no vocal harmonizer (while all the competitors do) also bothers me a bit. So I will probably wait until a G70 comes to local stores, or at least to the big on-line retailers who have 30-day return policy - as much as G70 looks good to me on paper, your frank comments will keep me from buying one sight unseen, which would not have been a good thing anyways.

I am glad you found happiness with the PA1X - enjoy.

Regards,
Alex