Ken,

I applaud your efforts to look into support before buying. This issue will definitely be taking a more important role in my next decision of which instrument to buy.

I own Roland gear for a while now, and must say that I was also disappointed with their support. Here in the US there is no way to contact Roland support (other than going through your dealer, and mine was EXTREMELY unhelpful - leave the keyboard for two weeks or until we get to it, or pay extra for same-day service type of thing, as well as useless for technical info requests). In Canada Roland has an e-mail contact (You have to have a canadian address to get a reply), but they were also not very helpful in getting technical information (e.g. certain file structures) which I was looking for.

I don't know if this helps you in making your decision, and how this compares with the other manufacturers' support policies. At the time when I was looking for info/support/repair and got none, I was pretty upset (and still am). However, it comes down to the balance of this against the features you really want in the instrument.

Regards,
Alex