//Vic,
It's interesting you should mention the expansion slots. The four expansion cards you chose will cost about $900 - almost the price of another keyboard. All it is is memory expansion, and by constricting you to using their proprietary memory cards (of only 64 MB capacity), they force you to pay for the media, and not for the sounds themselves. Wouldn't you rather buy the sounds on a CD (even at $50 each set, would run you $200) and load them into non-volatile memory card (about $50) yourself, for a quarter of the price?//

You have both choices. you can buy sample CDS and load them in the fantom or you can expand the fantom's 64MB rom sounds to 320MB OF WAVE ROME DATE! .

//The idea of using proprietary memory cards is at least 10 years old - ancient in electronic terms. At least when you get a plug-in board from a Yamaha, you get a whole sound engine, with added polyphony. You get none of that from Roland.//

OK, as far as I understand it. those PLG boards have there own Polyphony for there own sounds right? like the MOSS with it's 6 VOICES. korg clamed that it increase the polyphonice from 62 to 68. but in reality it isnt, it's just adding total polyphony that the keyboard can produce. the 6 voice are for the moss board's sounds and the moss board sounds can not share with the triton's HI62 POLyphony. isn't it the same with yamaha?

-One nice thing about the fantom is Resampling. and the SKIPBACK SAMPLING feature. those too features pretty much allow you to just have unlimited polyphony and the resampled file only uses one note(polyphony)

//I am not saying that Roland instruments are all bad, and the competition is all good. Each has their own strong points. However, I feel that Roland has lost its competitive edge, at least with the current product lineup.//

No roland didn't lose. the FantomS is just not for you that's all .

Alex

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