I still believe that is the STYLES that make or break one's choice in an arranger... and not JUST the ROM styles. Yes, I need great live sounding styles, but I also need a solid (and hopefully, American slanted) supply of NEW and legacy styles.

This is the corner that Ketron have painted themselves into. Yes, the onboard styles sound incredible... as recordings of great musicians should. But this means that any new styles need to match this quality. And new styles (especially ones biased towards us non-Mediterranean players) are few and far between, and legacy Ketron styles don't use the live loops that the ROM ones do (or only a drum track, if older styles can be imported).

Add to that, they are incredibly expensive to produce compared to MIDI styles, and cannot be re-voiced (substituting a brush kit for the sticks one, i.e.) and you end up with a much smaller selection of styles to pick and choose from. If the ROM selection covers ALL your needs, and you don't get bored with the same old, same old quickly, then the Audya offers much that puts it head and shoulders above other arrangers.

But for me, this one issue makes it a non-starter for me.

And we still haven't got into the limited audio guitar (or any chord based track) chord selection that the current generation of hardware forces on you. Maybe when Ketron redesign to adopt current generation hardware (faster SSHD's, faster RAM pipelines) and maybe design some easy to use software that facilitates easy import of current sliced audio libraries, the style selection will explode, and we can watch it grow into the product we NEED (or at least, I need).

Until then...