Integra-7 is a very powerful sound module with a few not entirely insignificant disadvantages. It is very well built; a big metal box that you can put in a 19” rack. They packed inside the Integra-7 thousands of sounds (almost the whole history of Roland is there). There are so many instruments and sounds that you will hardly ever use all of them. There are over 6000 sounds but not all of them are great. Many are pretty plastic but there are still many that are very good.
Inside Integra-7, you can edit basically everything or design your own sounds from a scratch. SuperNatural engine has a lot of possibilities for designing acoustic, synth and drum sounds. For example, acoustic pianos are pretty nice and you can edit things such as string resonance or hammer noise and change the whole character of the sound. There are also a few hundreds of PCM waves that you can use to create your sounds almost from scratch. You can use four PCM layers at the same time and individually edit and design each one of them, which gives really countless possibilities.
Integra-7 has a decent effect processor and every channel/instrument can get one dedicated effect, next to a master chorus and reverb. There are multiple stereo outputs including one pair of TRS and XLR outputs and you can send different channels on different outputs, which is a very useful thing. There is support for a surround too.
The first minus point is that there is only 128 voice polyphony. It is enough if you use only a few instruments at the time but if you want to run the whole arrangement and make all 16 midi channels busy, you could pretty soon feel limited.
One other minus point is that certain sounds must be loaded into four virtual slots in order to be used and there is a limitation since you cannot load all of them at once. For example, there are all twelve SRX expansions inside the Integra-7 but you can use only four of them at once. The same goes for SuperNatural expansions and there is one expansion that needs all four slots. I did not expect to find such limitations in such an expensive and powerful sound module.
The last and biggest minus point is the editing process. Integra-7 has a small old-school display (mine flickers for some reason!) and if you want to do some advanced editing and programming, you will spend a lot of time scrolling the menus on a rather tiny screen, which will not be very comfortable. In the past, Roland almost always had a dedicated software that you can use to edit and control devices from your computer. For Integra-7, the best editor has been made for iPad. For Windows, there is an editor that you have to run as a VST in your DAW and there is no support at all for older DAWs. I do not understand why Roland decided to do this since they made really excellent software editors for some older devices such as SonicCell.
The biggest question concerning Integra-7 for most people out there is “is it worth it”. It is an expensive device and no, it is probably not worth it if you are not someone who programs a lot and designs sounds or if you just play only certain instruments all time. There is not much sense in investing so much money and using only a small percentage of it. However, if you are a producer, arranger who prefers to go deep into MIDI programming and sound design this could be something for you.