I honestly don't think it matters whether it has USB 1 or USB 2 unless the interface works at the full (or close to it!) speed potential of each protocol. AFAIK, the only function the PA800 has that even requires the improved speed of USB 2 would be sample loading (who would need 50MB of style data in a few seconds?), but as of yet, no-one has posted any real world sample load up times with a USB 2 HD.

As I have stated many times in the past, sampling in an arranger demands WAY more speed of loading than a regular workstation, simply because of the demands of going from ANY song to ANY song at the drop of a hat. If these styles use sampled sounds, the necessity that they load up close to instantaneously is imperative.

Imagine if your arranger took two minutes to load a style.... you probably would never use that style in a live setting...!

If my 10 year old (plus!) K2500 can load at 1MB/sec, if you read USB 1's specs, theoretically it should be able to get very close to the K2500's load times, yet there is not a single sampler out there that uses USB 1 that even approaches 1/10th of that speed. And just including USB 2 in the PA800 will not be of any significantly useful increase unless the sample RAM load times get exponentially faster, which so far no-one has indicated.

One of the main reasons that Mediastation and other computer/hardware arrangers are showing the way is the phenomenally faster sample load times, and even sample streaming (although the thought of a HD doing a read or write while it encased in a keyboard that you are pounding on at the same time gives me pause!) at contemporary computer speeds. If your arranger needs to go dead for AT LEAST a minute, to load up 64MB of samples (less than a 1/10th of the T2's total RAM capacity), and probably more like 3-4 mins, you just aren't going to use it much, and thus the 'feature' becomes more of a marketing hype tool than a practical, ARRANGER based function.

We need to place as much pressure as possible on arranger manufacturers to add a 21st century data transfer protocol to 21st century arrangers, otherwise they are just dangling a carrot in front of us that we will never reach......