Let's take this in order... To the genesys;
The Audya has never bee accused of not RECOGNIZING any chord thrown at it. What it DOES have a problem with is actually PLAYING them in audio loop form. mrdave reports maj min and a few 7ths. And that is THAT. Play a dim or an aug, and the loop stops cold, a MIDI part plays until you change back to a maj or min again. No sus's, no aug's. Dropout time again.
I can see Ketron's need to add extensions by an additional note or two, but whole basic chords (sorry if anyone thinks a diminished or augmented chord is not 'basic'
) being completely missing is, IMO, simply unacceptable. It's of GREAT significance that Ketron do not provide (as yet) any soloed guitar track demos that extends beyond maj/min/7th. So, as potential buyers, we are denied opportunity to decide if this feature works acceptably or not. For my part, if it did, I would have expected them to showcase it. It simply seems too much of a 'kluge'.
Mike... I won't respond too much to the Roland baiting. On another Audya thread I've already brought up the G70's 'unfinished' launch myself before your post appeared. Suffice it to say, the G70's unfinished nature did not involve basic operation, it worked impressively enough at launch for it to persuade me to drop my long-loved G1000, and whatever has been added has come as an enhancement to an already good product, not a necessary addition just to get basic functionality. To you, it was a '3'. To me, it's still a '7.8'
Or, if you prefer, maybe a '3' on the Richter Scale won't raise your hairs, but on the Fujita Scale it will definitely wake you up!
But that is simply our individual opinions, not quite the fact you present it as!
As to USB2, what possible use is that to an arranger without a sampler? We've discussed this before, but offline storage isn't quite the pressing need, in my book. As it is with the Audya, to be fair. As long as it loads from it's HD fast enough for live use, loading up at home isn't quite the problem. Don't forget, although it may lack USB2, it's internal data bus is ATA, EIDE or SATA, like most computers (few use USB2 internally). And from reports unconfirmed, it manages at least 1MB/sec data transfer to the RAM, completely outpacing several keyboards with USB2 interfaces. The bottleneck is STILL the data pipe, and not the interface, IMO. Yes, it's a definite inconvenience working at home, but not the impediment to live play that having whole chord types disappear (to be replaced by regular MIDI, non-Mega guitar parts) could be...
And what about the glacial save on the Yamaha's sampler? It's a huge improvement over THAT, at least
That doesn't achieve even floppy disk speeds
Users report HOURS for saves of edits on large files.
I simply find myself being able to cut the Audya slack in certain areas, but once again, I have to ask... are we not musicians first and foremost? I can take almost any sort of OS weirdness or offline inconvenience, but anything that detracts from it's MUSICAL effectiveness gets a 'fail' grade, I'm sorry to say...