The MU80 is the first unit to use the XG format. XG is a new tone generator specification that expands the qualities of both MIDI and General MIDI standards. Even as I write this piece, the MU80's capacity changed due to the XG format. Currently, the MU80 has 729 voices and 21 drum kits. There is a stereo A-to-D converter with an internal 34 input digital mixer and digital signal processing.

The MU utilizes Advanced Wave Memory (AWM) with digital filters and an eight-megabyte ROM for storage of waves. "Note Stealing" is virtually eliminated since the MU has 64-note polyphony with 32-part multitimbrality. There are 128 preset voices and 128 user voices and up to four voices can be layered along with effects for one huge patch. There is also a MIDI interface to allow for General MIDI-A and General MIDI-B or up to 32 MIDI channels total.