Ok, I JUST received this yesterday.  BUT, I have been using the SR16 for over 15 years and used the HR16 before it since the 80s.  As some have said, right away you can hear the improvement in the sound, not that the SR16 sounded bad... but this sounds great.  I have yet to build my own patterns with this but I see all the familiar buttons to do that, so I suspect it will be very similar to the SR16, which was easy to use, though certainly time consuming to build the patterns, but thats ok.  I have gone through about 10 of the patterns so far only because I plugged in my guitar and jammed on each one.  Here are the early thoughts:  Number 1, if you are a guitarist who has to jam alone a lot, you are going to absolutely love this thing because of the fact that you can get some really nice drum and bass going on at the same time.  The pads that give you the drums also give you the notes for the bass for you to program that.  Each of the patterns I whipped through took me into different guitar ideas and such, same as jamming with a live drummer and bassist would do.  It was fun... and, you know, if you ever have to spontaneously just play SOMETHING for someone it kinda sucks when there is only guitar unless you are a world class guitarist.  With this, you get the drums and bass along with you and it makes what you do sound more interesting.  Number 2, I think the existing patterns are pretty cool for jamming, but they seem a bit busy for recording... so look at this drum machine as a tool in that its greatest use out of the box is jamming... and then you get the bonus of having the ability to program it for song demos.  I have a real drumset and mics and processors and let me tell you trying to record good sounding acoustic drums is a nightmare.  In the end the better sounds of a good drum machine, while not always as organic as you'd like still lead to a better sounding demo most of the time compared to live drums in a home demo situation.  Number 3, reiterating Number 1, if you are a guitarist or keyboardist... really... the ability to have bass involved as well as drums is AWESOME.  I thought the bass would just be a nice little bonus.. its done better than that to make it more than a little thing.  I read many reviews on here of people downplaying the bass feature saying they would record their own bass.  I agree with them... when recording, you would.  But... for simple fun and jamming... this rocks.