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I was thinking this could be an excellent upgrade to my earlier JV-1080 (and later on XP-30). So, I sold my old equipment and saved up and went to the store, picked up a XV-3080, came back home, and immediately started with loading in my latest XP30 sysex dump, containing my own patches and performances. Great. The patches sounded almost the same as before, and now I had lots of more outputs and expansion possibilities. But hey... the performances didn't load. I gave it one more try. Tough shit. I read the manual. Even tougher. The XV series cannot read JV/XP performance data. And I've got around 200 "JV"-type of songs that I really would like to be able to go back to, maybe re-edit or maybe just fix some volume levels and so on. But if I have to find every sound once again (a tough job when you've got over 1000 to choose from with some expansion cards inserted - even though they've invented a nifty Patch Finder button...) so I decided this morning that I have to take it back to the store, because it won't do the job. I'm probably getting a JV-2080 instead, since that is a more competent machine actually, for less money. Sad to say, I had imagined that the 3080 would feature those FX units as the 2080 has, but rather, they've added on 15 new FX patches or so, but then that's the only upgrade from the 1080's original effects unit. And the price for this machine is _much_ higher than for the 2080 even... very strange, considering that the 3080 is an upgraded 1080, really. With the "downgrade" of not being backwards compatible to a 100% degree. So, for me, this is merely anything more than a pretty paperweight. I could have been free of all this hassle if Roland had 1) used their brains just a little bit more and considered how many 1080's there is out there in studio reality - or 2) possibly mentioned that it had an "flashy, new, wooshy, not backwards-compatible performance mode"... I mean, the Akai S3000 series was a major upgrade to the S1000 but it still could read all those sounds just as the S1000 would have done it. And the Akai S5000/6000 could also read older sample data. Therefore, it's simple for a die-hard user of the predecessor to switch on to the new machine but still use the old material. I can't understand how Roland really not sorted this out at all, instead, making all of us scratch our heads and have to consider keeping our 1080s and 2080s and maybe add on something else to those instead. At least, there are other great manufacturers and synths out there. Stay away from the XV if you need your JV banks to work perfectly. The XV is a great choice for a newbie looking for an all-purpouse module, though. Oh, maybe not, since the day for recording in a real studio, you have to bring your own synth to make it work, even though they've got a JV workhorse there... kind of bad, I think. Choose between A) Studio standard for a very good price or B) New and strange standard for a very high price. For me, that choice would be simple. I'd go for the "best in practice" machine, which is: the old one. Roland - read this and eat your hats.
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