Hey Dabmeister17, I was wondering the same thing as I also have a 1080 and I like it (but what do I know, I'm a guitarist). The 5080 seems to have come down in price recently but that might mean Roland is rolling out the next big thing.

I've got 5 of the expansion cards that go into the 4 slots in the 1080 and one reason I'm thinking about adding the 5080 is to have access to all 5 at once without switching. I'm also wondering if the cards sound better out of the 5080 than the 1080.

Originally posted by musicalhair:
The 5080 seems to have come down in price recently but that might mean Roland is rolling out the next big thing.

Fantom X and XR

I've got 5 of the expansion cards that go into the 4 slots in the 1080 and one reason I'm thinking about adding the 5080 is to have access to all 5 at once without switching. I'm also wondering if the cards sound better out of the 5080 than the 1080.

Don't know for sure, but I believe that the factory patches are different when you stick a SR-JV card into an XV synth as opposed to a JV. Also, changes in the architecture lend to a difference in the sound. Like improved effects, better converters, etc.

Well, is there something new on the horizon that'll be hitting the streets this spring? Maybe double the current polyphony. Or better still, some sort of s/w interface catered to windows/mac users w/ the capability of editing the sounds & performance parameters. This is very interesting.

the fantom XR rack is out....

I'm finding that Roland stopped producing the XV-5080. While there is still support, I'd like to know why they stopped production? I think this was one of their better modules for some time. Did they sell enough of them? What happened?

i'm tellin ya, the new fantom module is out ;)

So I assume the Phatom "X" series is what's taken over on the XV series. I checked out the Phatom X w/ the color screen & 128 note polyphony. This seems to be a cool keyboard. It's funny because I really did'nt care for the Phantom some time ago. Times change.