Fran,

I am sorry to hear you still haven't had a chance to play the G70 - this is the testament to the poor marketing decisions of Roland.

I have tried it on two occasions. It still has the same polished (to my ear) Roland sounds. The few styles I tried sounded good, but I have not gone through all of them. Some or all of them may have been from the VA- series, but I wouldn't know it - I am still playing the G1000. Of course, Roland styles are more polished, more "smooth" than the others - not as gritty as Ketron's, nor as generic as Yamaha's, but I am used to it. I must have been playing the V2.0 instrument, since both the sounds and the styles sounded just fine to me, certainly no "too much reverb" feel. I am sure that the MIDI playback is also top-notch. I thought that the keys were similar to my G1000 - just perfect size and travel depths - I much prefer them to Korg and Ketron, and definitely to Yamaha (though T2 is an improvement over their previous ones). I also thought that the keyboard had a very solid feel, although undoubtedly adds to its weight.

As far as user friendliness goes - I did not think about Manuel's concern how close the buttons are, though if I owned this board, I am sure I would have come across this. What concerned me much more was the fact that now you absolutely have to use the touchscreen to change your selection - the buttons only allow you to select tone/style/performance banks, individual selections MUST be made via the touchscreen. This is horrible - on the VA series they had the goofy round buttons which changed colors, but now even they are gone. It would only take 8 extra buttons to correct this glaring shortcoming.

The other beef I have is with the sliders. In the short while I played the G70, I found myself getting confused by looking at the slider positions thinking that those are my current level settings for the parts - this is not at all true. The slider's position is only meaningful after you move it, and if the part was very quiet, and you moved it a bit down from where it was in the topmost position, its volume will jump. So at any time looking at the slider position is guaranteed to visualize the incorrect part volumes. You have to look at the screen and check part volumes there, and then move the slider to adjust the part volume, but this is as much assle as using up and down buttons of, say, Tyros. By the way, these comments also apply to Korg PA1x, except that Roland sliders have shorter travel and flimsier feel than Korg's. I am surprised that with instrument prices being well over $3000, Roland and Korg were too cheap to put in motorized faders.

I also thought that at this price, the G70 should have included the MP3 playback capability, but that is not really a problem.

For the record, I think that Roland has a near-perfect operating system on its Fantom. with the selection keys BELOW the screen, and no touch-screen. Why couldn't they just reuse it on the G70 is beyond me.

Both of my above concerns with the usability also apply to Korg's PA1x/pro. IMHO, Yamaha is the current leader in usability, and they have done it by keeping things simple, though its 61 keys are an issue for me).

Regards,
Alex