As I said, the brass sounds are compressed when compared to the BK-9!
The keybed is much worse, there are no supernatural sounds (SN-A piano and trumpet are nice in the BK-9!), and there is no chord sequencer.

By Dynamix.

https://soundcloud.com/alfaholic/roland-e-a7-work-in-progress
https://soundcloud.com/alfaholic/roland-e-a7-work-in-progress-2
https://soundcloud.com/alfaholic/dynamix-styles-3-beat-125-roland-e-a7
https://soundcloud.com/alfaholic/roland-e-a7-playing-with-effects

These sound quite good!
As do some piano and strings demos.
Comparing it with a Casio is an insult. I think Roland put in very mixed quality here, and as they squeezed in such a vast number of sounds, they obviously chose to compress some of them like brass, but not all.
I guess all in all it is better and more versatile than the BK-5 (and it costs much more than the BK-5), but as I said you can't compare it with the BK-9.

Of course not, Roland Europe doesn't exist any more, there are no Roland factories in Europe. Just sales subsidiaries.
But the BK models except BK-9 were already manufactured in China. My BK-7m packaging says "designed in Italy, made in China".

These sound quite good!
As do some piano and strings demos.
Comparing it with a Casio is an insult. I think Roland put in very mixed quality here, and as they squeezed in such a vast number of sounds, they obviously chose to compress some of them like brass, but not all.
I guess all in all it is better and more versatile than the BK-5 (and it costs much more than the BK-5), but as I said you can't compare it with the BK-9.

Casio has great products at the moment and many pros agree with me. Look how many pros use the Casio px-5s.

But Casio has a long way to go to be competitive in the Arranger KB market again....
I for one hope they do in the future somehow...we need more players in the game..

7 assignable switches very useful..

Why 2 separate screens ? Navigation sucks on Roland arrangers IMO.

Dan...I think we should hear from some BK9/E A7 SZ players on the attributes of the double screen and or coupled with an iPad also pro/con?

I have the BK-9 and E-A7 a the moment and have to say that the BK-9 is still a superior board sound-wise - more sounds, MFX etc. However, the E-A7 excels when it comes to navigation and accessing user content. The dual screen is fantastic on the E-A7 due to abundance of buttons (sort of like on Yamaha), but a real pain on BK-9 due to the stupid dial and no ENTER/ CONFIRM button. Now the BK-9 has the advantage of using the IPAD/apps, but where they messed up is the lack of USER Content access through the apps. For the money, both of these boards are phenomenal and can sound like any of the TOTL arrangers with little tweaking. Oh, the accordion sounds on the E-A7 are out of this world.

Let me know if anybody needs a direct comparison of any features while I still have both.

Goran

Salsaman, the BK-9 does not have a select button - you have to push the dial down to do that. Now, they do have a select button right besides the dial, but it only switches between the two screens - I imagine a simple OS update could enable the button to act as ENTER/ CONFIRM. Furthermore, the dial can be touchy when pushing down and you have to kind of use 2 fingers to keep it centered in order not to change any values while confirming.

to elaborate on the user content access (styles etc.), my biggest gripe is that once you select a user style and exit the folder, upon return to choose another style you start at the top of the list and not from the last selected style. This is so counter productive and involves a lot of scrolling depending on the number of items contained in the folder. I guess they really wanted you to use performances for everything.

Despite everything, the keybed on the BK-9 is is excellent in my opinion and makes it worth putting up with the shortcomings. However, I still prefer the little E-A7's buttons and accessibility to menus and options. As of right now, I think I am going to keep both.