I'm sorry James, but perhaps you haven't been here for the last five years while Dom CONSTANTLY told us that the MS WAS an arranger. He NEVER came here and told us it was an empty VSTi player, and that we would HAVE to do all the work ourselves for it to sound better than a Casio. Dom himself made the comparison...

And Yamaha, Ketron and Korg have samplers in them. This makes them pretty much identical to an open machine, albeit at a different level. You are using your V-Machine primarily as a sampler, aren't you? My G70 has a virtual B3 in it... how is this different to running B4 on a VSTi? Plus it has a lot of sounds in it that rival many VSTi's... Bottom line is, open or closed, the musician on the whole needs a palette of sounds to work with that will cover most music, and many of the TOTL closed models have that covered VERY well, already. If you think in terms of playing the vast majority of music that most arranger players do, a T3 or PA2X can do most of it without even going to the sampler, and that can cover most other needs.

I said from day one that all the MS was was a blank slate, and have tried to point out from day one also that making styles and soundsets as good as, let alone better than a closed arranger was beyond the skill of any of us. Time has born me out. I haven't heard a user style on the MS yet that gave even my G70 a run for its' money. But Dom constantly dissed closed arrangers as passé, but never acknowledged that the CONTENT is what makes arranger players buy arrangers, and his keyboard had NONE worth talking about.

An open keyboard IS technically unlimited, but it takes a player with prodigious technical skills to create something on it that a child with a T3 could do in his sleep! Let's face it, arrangers are bought by people that DON'T want the already better soundsets that modern WS have. They are bought by people that don't want the techno and hiphop loops that come with modern WS's. They are bought by people that want familiar sounds and styles of yesteryear, and no WS, open or closed, caters to their taste.

Sure, someone COULD make an open keyboard geared to the older player. But he would first have to stock it with what a great closed arranger already has. He would have to make an OS that provides the live player all the conveniences that a great arranger already has... And in this area in particular, Dom failed miserably. You mentioned that only the content needs to be provided, IF the OS of an arranger is provided. And here as well, the MS failed badly. You only have to read Dennis's post about his real life experience with the MS to see that, OK, maybe it's all right to expect the user to provide all his own content, but you shouldn't expect him to write the OS too! For Pete's sake! No Bass inversions, let alone chord inversions (for just one example)... A Casio can do that!

For the MS to be competitive as an arranger, it not only needs content equal to the best of the closed arrangers, but an OS that is their equal too. The list of OS features geared to the arranger player that are missing on the MS is formidable. Not to mention that many things it DID implement, it did so in a very clumsy, inelegant manner. Dom needed FAR more than just a few styles and a soundset to make it work.

Didn't stop him constantly telling us it WAS better than any closed arranger, though. It would take more than you doing a few demos to get this off the ground. Look at the Audya. Incredible demos. Doesn't stop it being a dog, though, as iffy as the OS is at the moment. An arranger is the whole package. Content, OS, hardware, ergonomics and features. Hardware alone isn't even close. And that's all Dom ever provided.

To be honest, I am not sure it's even going to fly in the WS world, if the content is as bad as it was as an arranger. Even closed WS's like the MoXS and M3 and the Oasys (c'mon, man! That's no more open than an Audya. It only ran proprietary add ons. You could add virtual modeling boards to a MotifES. Did that make it an 'open' WS? ) have awesome content in them when you buy them. Great sounds, great arps, great loops. Add in the sampler, they aren't anywhere near as closed as all that! Dom tries to sell this with content as poor as the MS had, he's still got an uphill battle. Or is he selling it completely empty and finally acknowledging that the user WILL have to do everything themselves? That would be a nice change!

As I have said ad nauseam, the only people that could make an open arranger as good as a closed one are the very people making sounds and styles for the closed market. No-one out in the real world has ever accomplished this task, and if they could, they would already BE working for Korg or Yamaha or Roland. What would you estimate, James? Be honest... how many people do you know capable of turning an open VSTi player into a full on arranger capable of blowing the T3 out of the water?

And of those tiny few (if any), how many would even WANT to? Players good enough to make TOTL styles got WAY better things to do with their time!

Theoretically, you COULD build a rocket to the moon. All the parts are available. But who actually has? Open keyboards are the same thing. You COULD turn them into something better than a T3. But first you would need the skills to make a T3. No-one expects you to be able to build a piano before you can play it. It's considered OK to leave that to the piano builders. And expecting you to build a TOTL arranger out of a Frankenstein's monster of different pieces parts is as equally dumb, IMO. Leave it to the experts.

Plenty of expansion 'openness' on even arrangers like the T3 or PA2X if they have a sampler. Enough for 99% of the arranger playing demographic, anyway. The MS was a product for the 1%. Even Dom can't make a living on that margin, despite eschewing making any decent content for the MS while he WAS calling it an arranger