I FINALLY got a chance to audition the KN7000 in person last week and in ONE word, I gotta say, this is one fabulous sounding & beautiful looking keyboard. There was a KN6500 sitting next to it so I got to compare them. The KN6500 certainly sounded impressive but the vastly improved KN7000 speaker system really takes the KN keyboard sound to NEW HEIGHTS giving the Steinway piano sample & all the other legendary Technics orchestral instruments a whole added dimension of depth and richness. The KN7000 speakers bring on a whole new life to the support styles as well. I particular enjoy the swing patterns which seem to breathe even more now. The SD memory is another marvel. Hard to imagine how so much memory can be held in such a small card.

My disappoint comes with the drums. Though the drum samples themselves sound terrific, the volume of specific 'individual' drum style pattern parts (ei snare) seemed weak and without enough punch in relation to the other drum parts. In addition, the fills tend to rely to heavily on instrumental fills rather than drum riffs. I realize that one can customize and tweak these drum patterns, but it is not easy to edit 'individual drum note velocities via the Technics pattern editor, is it? On the KN5000, because there was no way to universally edit all the occurances of one specific drum instrument (snare, hihat, kick, etc), I had to go into the pattern step editor and indiviually adjust the velocity level of each & every occurance of a specific drum part, VERY time consuming & labor intensive. Does the KN7000 provide an easier method? It would be nice if the KN7000 had a special drum editor window where you could universally raise/lower the velocity level of all the occurances of just a specific note, reresenting a single drum instrument: snare, hihat, kick, etc.

Another disapointment is that there is no ONE button approach to activate a 'fill' when switching to/from ANY variation. My final beef is that the KN7000 vocalizer offers severely limited (1 only?) vocal harmony backup selection.

Even with my above disappointments, the KN7000 shines so brightly in all OTHER areas, that I rank it as one of my top 2 (or 3) keyboard contender favorites. If the few disappoints I listed above aren't important to you (and I'm sure that means most of you on this forum), then the KN7000 is DEFINITELY tops the rest of arranger keyboards on the market today.