The second flaw (and I am still scratching my head at this one) is the fact that you cannot directly hook the XV5080 up to your PC by SCSI.
SCSI had a huge following and Roland intended for new customers AND customers who were upgrading from older SCSI laden S Series samplers (i.e. Plus, at the time, USB wasn't so standard. The XV5080 debuted in 2000-2001, and USB 1.1 was the standard. The absence of this however IS understandable. This would've made the XV5080 perfect by FAR. The only TWO disapointments with the XV5080 in terms of expansion are: #1) No USB. WAV/AIFF formatted CDs into the XV5080 via SCSI CD-ROM. If that isn't enough for you, you can load any of Roland Formatted, Akai Formatted or. There are NINTEEN SR-JV cards to choose from. There are thriteen to choose from) AND FOUR SR-JV cards from the 1990s. You can ALSO expand the XV5080 with 128MB of RAM or FOUR SRX Boards (EXCELLENT sounds you can access right away. You can burn them to CD from there to if you like.
You can easily drop these things into a Card Reader (I have one built into my Windows XP and Vista PCs) and drag and drop them onto your hard drive for more secure storage. These are getting harder and harder to find. Wav Files and write to PC disks, you can essentially drag and drops samples onto the card from your PC! The XV5080 can access up to 128MB on Smart Media cards. A lot of people using gear with SCSI do not know this, but they DO make a LOT of SCSI Card Readers, which can allow using CF and SD cards of up to 32GB as a Solid State Hard Disk. The XV5080 outclasses every other Roland synth, even the Fantom XR, to which by comparison, is only lacking USB (Okay, so that is major, but read on). Examples of effects include SRV Reverb, Chorus, Delay, Stereo Chorus, RSS, COSM Distortion, Gated Reverb, Spectrum, Enhancer, etc. With the addition of the separate Reverb and Chorus controls, the 3 MFX should be MORE than enough in practice.
Some of the OLDER sounds however, do rely COMPLETELY on the effects to give them their unique quality (i.e. The sounds on the XV sound stellar enough that a large amount of effects really aren't needed. A lot of people complain about having sixteen individual effects. With clever programming, you can manipulate some of the inner workings of the parts (TVA, LFO, Resonance, etc.) to create imitation effects. However, with the addition of COSM and SRV effects (completely redesigned), you won't feel as if any corners had been cut in this department. Some of these were ported over from the JV Variety.
Effects The Roland XV5080 has 90 high quality effects built in. Bottom line is, unless you plan on writing for an orchestra the size of the Soviet Red Army, you have little to worry about. You will typically use 64 notes of polyphony at any given time. Unlike the days when most modules and keyboards featured 64 notes or less, 128 is MORE than enough, and will STILL be more than enough twenty years from now given the specs of 32 parts.