I have owned a Roland MV8000 for about 2 months now and I couldn't love it more. I bought mine used from a local music store. I did have hard drive problems with it at first, but I went to best buy and bought a 120 GB internal computer hard drive for $50 and it completely fixed it. There is great Roland support from there website with updates that you can download into the MV through the USB. There is also a site called www.mvnation.com that also is a great support site for just the MV. The MV8000 can do it all, you can auctually run your whole recording studio off of just this one machine. All the sounds are built into the 40gb hard drive. I have recently purchased a VGA and mouse expansion card from roland for the MV. If you buy a MV8000 new it comes with it free. The MV has live effects and also all of Boss's bass/gutair effects are built into the machine. The pads are great. I even like the pads better than the MPC. The sounds are very high quality. The cd burner is great. the fact that is can use MPC floppy disk is even greater. The MPCs are good, but I would choose this amazing machine over any MPC anyday!!!!!! I would recommend getting a midi controller keyboard with it such as the M-Audio Axiom. Retail price is around $2300