In a live situation, instead of using the jogwheel to select your sounds, press and hold the function button and select your sound on the sequencer. You can ignore the led bar. This is much quicker.

Yes, you WILL edit sounds on stage, that’s what the MD is there for, that’s why there’s parameter locks. Just muting and unmuting tracks doesn’t cut it IMO. The whole point of the MD is that there’s no need for an extra “edit mode” vs. a “play mode”. You are constantly editing AND playing. And no you don’t even need to “read” the display, all you need to see are the knob position indicators on the display.

Look at that guy here, he uses the MD properly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvSU_aUOBpg

The “big black wheel” is called a jogwheel. And the Machinedrum is not hard to find at all, in fact pretty much every good store has them. If you go to a little guitar shop then they probably won’t have it, but that doesn’t qualify as “hard to aquire”.

“However, to be honest the Machinedrum is the best drum machine out there. Period.”

While I am inclined to agree with your assessment, I doubt that you arrive at this conclusion after doing any sort of meaningful comparison. In other words, I find this review lacking.