Yes and a lot cheaper. The King of Rip off Yamaha charge 150 Euro for that Jodel crap.

My G70 was not INTENDED to have a Guitar Mode. Or multi band EQ on every sound. Nor was the E80 INTENDED to have MP3 playback. Just as the T2 wasn't INTENDED to have SA2 capabilities. But, magically, my G70 DOES have those abilities, and the T2 DOESN'T...

I'm still using my G70, very happily. And it does considerably more than when I bought it, and has considerably more sounds than when I bought it. And your T2 is GONE and you had to pay for a T4... But at least we are BOTH happy!

And when Yamaha have a sample library for the T4 that even comes CLOSE to what is available in Akai format, you might have a point. But just ONE small Akai sample creator has more content available than the entire Yamaha library. I still use quite a bit of Akai, in the studio, after import to my Kurzweil. And I know a LOT of pros that still use these go to libraries. Yes, a lot of people have moved on to GIGA sized libraries, but you can't really use these in any arranger simply because of the sheer SIZE of the samples. Disk streaming made any attempt to be efficient at RAM usage pointless, but when you HAVE to load these into a live keyboard sampler, especially an arranger one with a limited RAM (at least limited by GIGA standards!) your best bet to get in as much as you can is still the Akai format (or Roland, or Kurzweil). And by FAR, the largest choice, and a lot of the very best quality was in Akai format.

I don't know if you ever got to use some of the XSample library or many of the really top ones, but I can assure you, there is much is Akai format that is still the equal of many VSTi, and ALL of it can be fit into the small RAM sizes currently in arrangers. Maybe one day the Kronos streaming off an SSHD system will make its way to arrangers. Until then, smaller RAM efficient samples will still be the best use of limited resources, IMO.