Finally NAMM reviews are up!
Roland: V-synth GT looks extrenely interesting. Too bad no sound demos yet. It will be interesting to hear what the Articulative Phrase synthesis sound like. It appears that combining various articulations into a patch is the in-thing now - trying hard to follow the foot-steps of softsampling.
The new FPs are also interesting. New Progressive Hammer with 100 incremental steps - I hope they realised that this will only be brought to it's full potential if the sampled instrument has that number of sample/note. That will be impossible since no softsampler has even that kind of sample depth - not to mention a memory limited keyboard. Therefore, it will only be pure volume incremental increase. But audio file playback via USB - simply genius! I also see that they have removed the speakers facing forwards towards the audience like it's predecessor FP-5 - now the speakers only faces upwards. And it's nice to have a LCD finally.
The EXR-46OR - boring. I tried the predecessor EXR-40OR - sounds are basically from the world expansion card. They added more into this one, but I'm sure they are available in current expansion cards. Who would get a keyboard just for oriental sounds? Most already have a keyboard - it will make more sense getting a JV or an XV and that can be easily expanded with cards. The touch of the EXR-40OR is also terrible - plastic feeling and terribly unresponsive (no keybed padding - playing it is like tapping your fingers on a table). I'm not sure if they change the keys to this successor.
Let's see what else are in stored.