Now that all the fuss has died down, it's time to reflect on what this summer's British Music Fair has and has not achieved. Certainly, it's proved this country's modern musicians will attend a big musical instrument exhibition, and attend it in large numbers. It's proved that there is a very real thirst for new information and new technology on the part of a lot of those musicians, a thirst that a show like the BMF can go some way towards quenching. And it's proved that the music industry as a whole has been missing an annual public event at which it can show off its latest produce to the people who will eventually end up using it - musicians.

The show gave us at E&MM a chance to meet some of the musicians who keep us in work by buying the magazine every month, and we now have a whole range of opinions and criticisms on which to base future writing and publishing decisions. It was certainly gratifying to know that so many readers appreciated the changes we've been making over recent months, and found them worthwhile. And, aside from the odd reader who'd found last month's E&MM difficult to recognise on newsagents' shelves, reaction to our new front cover design was pleasingly enthusiastic. To all those who came along and said hello during the BMF's three public days - and especially those who contributed to our two Live Aid raffles - many thanks are due.

On the other side of the fence, the consensus of opinion amongst industry figures was that the show had been a good thing, and that to do it again next year would be an even better thing. But between the end of this year's show and the start of next year's lies a busy 12 months of musical instrument development, and as ever, predicting exactly how those 12 months will go is a task ridden with difficulties.

If you turn to Page 34 of this month's E&MM, you'll find a fairly detailed report on what was new at the BMF, information that'll be useful both to those that couldn't make it and to those who spent too long struggling through the crowds to see (and hear) everything properly. But that's just the start of the story, because for a variety of reasons, there were a number of significant technological developments that weren't on display at Olympia.

Among them is Sequential's new Prophet 2000 sampling keyboard, about which we know very little at the time of going to press, save that it looks just like the keyboard in the photograph we've printed on Page 8. The 2000 is due to make its UK debut (in front of a gallery of stars etc, etc) at a London press conference by the time you read this, and we hope to get our hands on the latest instrument to carry the Prophet name shortly after that.

But from what we hear, Sequential's offering is only the first (or, including the Ensoniq Mirage, the second) of a large number of affordable sampling keyboards that are now under development in the laboratories of Casio, Yamaha, Roland and the rest. It's a pretty safe bet that these rivals will be unveiled at the Frankfurt show this coming February, but by that time, it could be that the dedicated sampling keyboard will be under fire from competing machinery of different forms.

When you consider that Atari's excellent 520ST micro is now in the shops in numbers (see Newsdesk), and that a lot of software houses now have STs under examination, it shouldn't be too long before some enterprising individual comes up with a fledgling computer music system based around the world's cheapest 16-bit home micro. Give it some hardware of the right specification and some software that musicians have no difficulty getting into, and such a system could potentially wipe the floor with a dedicated machine, from whatever manufacturing source. It could well be cheaper than any of them, too.

Then there's the threat from things modular, epitomised by Akai's S612 sampler (now made extremely appealing by the addition of an optional quick-disk unit), which saves you having to buy another keyboard if you already possess a suitable one with MIDI tacked onto its back. It's an approach that undoubtedly works, not least because it passes on a significant cost saving to the musician.

Yet to hear some people talk, you'd think that sound-sampling was a technique of such wonderful potential, the synthesiser will be extinct within 18 months. Frankly, we don't think this is likely to happen within a decade or more, let alone the next year and a half, and there's every indication that synthesiser design will take the odd extra leap and bound in the coming months as it faces competition from the sampling contingent. As the healthy debate in our Communique pages shows, there are still an awful lot of people unconvinced by what sampling technology has to offer them as musicians, and who will stick to their synthesising guns forever and a day. There's room for both techniques, of course, so to pretend that one will ultimately oust the other out of existence is foolishness beyond responsibility.