My arranger, right or wrong...

There IS no 'par' when talking about an entire arranger. NONE OF THEM ARE PERFECT. Every last one of them has something no other arranger has, and every last one of them has something that pretty much ALL the others do better.

What matters are YOUR particular needs, and then how quickly a manufacturer moves to correct shortcomings in certain parts of the OS or hardware. Some are quicker than others. Some go multiple generations with exactly the same flaw unfixed. Some throw perfectly good ideas away, to make room for other new features of dubious value. Some do virtually nothing except make online content easier to purchase.

I am pretty sure that everyone who ponied up for a T2 is still pretty happy about it's capabilities. Primarily because it's few, well documented shortcomings (or 'sub-par' features, if you will) never impacted their buying decision in the first place. No-one bought the T2 for it's sampler - it's closed nature would have deflected them to Korg in the first place. No-one bought the T2 although they thought the styles were too busy. They got a Roland or Ketron. Those that bought it thought the styles were great (and still do).

Take a look around... What has been released since the T2 that challenges it at the things it is best at? The SA voices, the integration between style play and SMF playback. The Mega voices and styles that use them... Nothing. There's a trickle down product (the S900) that steals a few SA voices, but the main T2 feature set is still intact.

VH issues... Look, Yamaha don't like technology from other sources. They don't make any good commercial VH products, so they can't fold them into the T2 OS. The only people that DO make good VH products are in direct competition with Yamaha. TC already have a deal with Korg. You can be SURE that's an exclusive deal.

But overall, I see next to nothing added to the OS of more recent arrangers that has anything to do with playing an arranger. Korg's guitar mode, perhaps, and that's it. Where are the new features? Gone to karaoke, every one...

Dueling MP3's, anyone? The HOME user, if they want to do karaoke, get a nice inexpensive karaoke player, not a $4500 arranger. This is only for pro's, who want to fool the audience they are NOT doing karaoke. Home users don't care...

I believe that all the TOTL arrangers are on a very level playing field. No one is dominant, no one is a complete dog. The only reason T2 users are getting defensive is that no-one has bought one lately and started gushing about it. And at $4500, that's not surprising, when an S900 can get surprisingly close to it's capabilities, and a third the price. The main things the T2 has the S900 does not are flawed (especially the sampler), so more and more make their comments about this smaller, lighter, cheaper keyboard (pun intended!). But most of their gushing could just as equally apply to the T2. Yamaha simply made the error (if you want to look at it that way) of making the trickle-down S900 BEFORE they raised the T-series bar a lot higher. Once that gets made, back to the trumpeting from IT'S owners....

My arranger, right or wrong....