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My work primarily involves sequencing supporting tracks for my cover band as well as my solo act. Since I evaluate synth hardware based primarily on sound quality rather than bells and whistles I am reviewing the XV on the stock ROM sounds only.
I admit I did not extensively audition this box prior to purchase. A fellow keyboardist recommended it, and when an on line retailer was blowing them out cheap as B stock I sprung for two of them, with the intention of buying all the SRX boards and loading them in.
After the first user preset came screaching through the monitors I wondered if this was Roland's best effort. Turns out the remaining presets were not much better. In a nutshell:
Acoustic pianos-fair, nothing impressive. EP's-Horrible. Organs-Useable, so fair to good. Guitars-Bad, but I hate all sampled guitars. Strings-Excellent. Roland shines here. Synths-Mediocre. Drums-Okay, useable. Plucked instruments - good. Noises- Depends if you find any useful.
Roland dumped an assload of effects on almost every patch in this machine. It's okay if your looking for impressive programming by Roland sound designers, but when your building a project one track at a time most of the patches are too much horsepower and not enough finesse. Or, all icing and no cake. Putting it bluntly, hard to use as stock sounds or completely unuseable. If you strip the junk off patches they become almost acceptable, so I do give Roland some credit.
On a positive note, the sounds are extremely clean with a polished sheen and the unit is dead quiet. No hiss, noise, nothing. Bravo!
My other boards are a Kurzweil K2600XS, K2000VP, Roland Jupiter 4 & 8, Juno 60, VP-330 vocoder, Oberheim Matrix 12 and OB-Xa, Yamaha CP-80 and TX-816 and pair of Emulator II samplers. So I do have other stuff to make a reasonable evaluation.
I would sell both XV boxes before anything else-even the old Emulators!
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