Zero rumors. At least not from anyone that knows anything!

In fairness, it looks rather like Roland have given up on arranger development on anything other than hobby/consumer level arrangers. It has been nearly five years since the EA7, and only one OS update and bug fix in the first year of launch.

I would love to be proved wrong, but my opinion is that Roland have left the building. But they went out on two quite good notes... The EA7 is exceptionally good value, sounds wonderful, nice and light and a barebones sampler if you are tech savvy enough to make your own loops and samples.

And the BK-9 is my favorite Roland of all time, giving us most of the G70 with a bunch of great new stuff (audio playback, audio loops, articulated sounds and a chord sequencer) at under half the weight of a G70!

If you like the Roland ‘sound’, either of these arrangers are still worth playing...

Sad, but it seems like you are right, and that leaves Yamaha, Korg and Ketron as the final 3 TOTL Arranger competitors.
It's all about money & business, so how long time it takes before development and production of 'autocomp-arrangers' has to bite the dust because of low sales remain to see. 🤔

we are the last generation Arranger keyboard players/users .

I'm sure that Yamaha and Casio will never stop making entry-level "auto-accompaniment" home keyboards. They make for a blockbuster Christmas gift and a great way to get kids interested in music. The question is, are we now seeing the last generation of PROFESSIONAL high-end arranger workstations?

I've never been overseas and have no idea of the market conditions there. The fact that Roland's latest MOTL was marketed as the E"A"-7 suggests that there might be more of a demand for these instruments in other continents and cultures. Is this gloomy outlook purely from an English-speaking, Western point of view?

To my knowledge the Roland operation in Italy which was responsible for producing Arranger Keyboards has been shut down and some of the workers have formed their own company "Dexibell" which currently produce quality stage pianos...

I live in hope that one day they start making arranger keyboards

https://www.dexibell.com/?lang=en

The EA7 was quite a departure for Roland's arranger division, the first sampler, the first multipads, the first 'surround the screen with buttons' approach like an S900 Yamaha. In fact, I tend to look at the EA7 as Roland Japan's first arranger (the previous having been primarily Italian designed) and, lacking experience, just decided to copy an S900 or so.

Sadly, it was too little, too late. While Korg and Yamaha had moved on to GB sized samplers, Roland's had a paltry 128MB! What is this, the friggin' 90's? And to add insult to injury, it imported no standardized multisample format. Bare .wav, no mapping, no Akai, no .sf2, not even Roland's old S class sampler format. So essentially, it was a 90's sampler incapable of even importing 90's sampler formats!

Then there's the multipads. Capable of MIDI and audio formats, but no audio loops included, and only the teensy tiniest number of MIDI multipads. So, yet another long requested feature finally appearing, only to be crippled by no content. If there's anything that will put off the average arranger user, it's little to no factory content for a feature! Imagine a Yamaha shipping without hundreds of multipad phrases, or a Korg with zero available sampler content...

Not gonna happen!

I believe that the truth is, we are watching a generational change in not only the means of production, but the tools of it as well. Let's face it, arrangers, without a TON of skill and really hard work, simply struggle to make contemporary sounding music. It's the wrong tool. It's the world of loop creation boxes, hardcore synths and clip triggering that drives contemporary pop.

Roland simply took too long to add the multipads and sampler that we had been begging for for at least 15 years, and did it so halfheartedly that those that really wanted the feature had no choice but to migrate to brands that did it properly. It's a shame, I think a couple more years R&D, it wouldn't have taken long to push the new features into competitiveness with Y&K, but looking at Roland's focus on hardcore synth technology and leveraging their legacy synth name recognition, it's pretty obvious that Roland's heart isn't in it any more.

But things in music evolve. Synths and then samplers totally killed the home organ market at least in any significant sales numbers. We are watching the same happen to the successor to the home organ. Some go out of business, some leave to concentrate on the new thing, some stick around in the twilight and gradually fade away. I simply think Roland have decided to cut their losses. The last gasp didn't have enough gas..!

On the bright side, if there's one thing that being orphaned (technologically speaking!) and left out in the cold helps you with, it's focusing on extracting the most out of what you have. No sitting around hoping the next TOTL Roland arranger will finally provide us with whatever we want to do at the touch of a button... No, what we have is all we will EVER have!

So now's the time to dig deep, and find what we want musically within ourselves. Want better brass voicing, learn to PLAY better brass voicing. Want better guitar parts, learn to PLAY better guitar parts. Want to have fun with music? Concentrate on the MUSIC..!

Truth is, any arranger from the last ten years or so can sound amazing... If it's PLAYED amazingly well. That's something that don't cost a dime, doesn't come included on even the latest greatest arrangers. It just takes a few minutes of your day, each and every day. That's time much better spent than endlessly discussing and waiting for the NEXT Roland arranger.

Use what you got... It's pretty damn good!

That nails it. It is all about the performance not the technology. Even going back to the Yamaha DX7 classic hits were made using it that still sound stellar today. It was all about the performance.