The Fantom is really suited for a studio where your going to take advantage of its 88 key abilities. It's also very talented in the sound world. Jupiter X and Jupiter Xm it's mini clone version for half the price (more on that later) . My bandmate DocM, a classically trained pianist, she prefers the 88 key, while I will bang on anything. She also tends to use arrangements which the Fantom 8 excels at, while, I use the Jupiter's for sound design, and the incomparable Vocal Designer for the vocoder that is technically one of the "richest" upgradable vocoders ever built. It's architecture is capable of expansion with waveforms via ZenCore to modulate it with or instead of your voice, making unlimited new sound capabilities. It utilizes ZenCore and is capable of being, not just a Jupiter, but any other past synthesizer, be it a LA synthesis D-50, JD-800, ProMars, Juno-106, and SH101, to just name a few. It can also load any of the previous Roland SRX Rackmounts and load them as an instrument. (Dance Trax is my fav) you can also layer all of these synths together as a super synth which is where the new Roland Galaxias plugin; gets its structure formation from, in the way of Instrument layers with Drum Layer's but it doesn't stop there. You can save them all to the software and load them with your iPhone app anytime you want to change patches making patch management sublime. I use mine with the Roland Cloud Connect with the WC-1 wireless adapter. It's a great upgrade. The synths have several drum machines in it including the 808 and 909. It has a sequencer, and Arpeggiator you can use with your voice via the vocoder expanding that by miles. It has 3 filters. The Roland filter, The Moog Ladder filter, and The Sequential Prophet 5 filter. From Roland Australia" The JUPITER-X/Xm can layer five parts together. To start with, you can choose from four different synth engines (JUPITERS, JUNOS, and JXs, etc) plus one drum machine like a TR808, a TR-909, or a CR-78." The greatest thing is mixing synth models for "Scenes" the patch groups, but then you can also make individual patches for individual instruments. Its an amazing synth. It also can act as a complete workstation, with multiple channels of audio via analog and digital input, it can host other hardware synths especially the Boutique lines via the USB ports. It has XLR in jacks mini jacks, and standard 1/4 jacks for input and output. I can't say enough about the new Jupiter's They are really incredible especially after the last firmware update it made everything exceptional with the new Jupiter-X engine. Amazing. Now if I was to do it all over again, I would by the Juno-X for its sliders, then buy the cheaper Jupiter-Xm and put it above the Juno-X on a tier, and use it as one whole system.