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Wanted to do a more comprehensive review, but have been busy with work, so I'll put my first impressions down at the least. In large part this is a comparison review, having had the WK 7600 for years and wanting an upgraded everything. Upon taking it out of the box I was stunned at how pretty the board is. When I take it places I'm aware of having a beautiful, shiny toy! Even from the back, it looks pretty cool. What a world of difference that touchscreen makes! I've had the WK7600 for a few years, and most of its functionality was lost on me 'cause i hate dealing with lousy user interfaces- been there, done that, not for me. That lovely display means I'm much more likely to take some deep dives into it's many compelling features. The keybed is better than i expected. I'm sorry to hear others are having noisy keys, it might just be a matter of time before this one starts clacking away. Compared to the 7600, i feel much more expressive. It's not on a par with the best keybeds I've played, but i feel like i can go from loud to soft in a satisfying way, and the extra strain you feel on some keybeds as you go high up on the black keys is not bad at all. I suspect that part of the increased sense of expressiveness is there are more velocity sensitive layers for many of the sounds, the 7600 seemed to have only 1 layer of sounds for many of their tones. I'm a bit underwhelmed with the speakers. I've heard powerful onboard speakers, like the Korg sp280, the Yamaha cp300, and to my recollection they delivered the goods. For a board with so many bass, synth and EDM sounds, the MZ speakers don't do those sounds full justice. I could tell right away the speakers were not super hi fidelity so i plugged into my QSC K10, which renders these sounds fully. I'm not complaining per se- it's mostly my expectations that were dissapointed, for volume, bass and fidelity- but heh, it's a huge upgrade from the 7600 and I'm glad they're onboard. i think the pads are outstanding. Smaller in size than i expected, but very responsive from soft to loud and soft touched enough you don't have to bang on it to get good expression, firm fingers do just fine. That's a relief! It was hugely dissapointing to me that they didn't make it a 76 note board, but i have to admit, they did an outstanding job at making it compact even with all the features crammed in. I took the 7600 out of its case the other day and was surprised to see what an aircraft carrier size board it is, not only long, but super deep. I like this compact design much more and the uptilted display etc. is very well done. The sounds are really something else, hard to describe. I don't like EDM sounds in general, I'm more of a jazz/pop/blues guy, but i love kickin' left hand bass, and many of the bass guitar and other sounds are really excellent for that- defined yet big and fat. I've barely scratched the surface with the hex layer sounds, but LOVE grabbing sliders to bring in/out the tones and messing with the cutoff and resonance. I find the resonance control different from any board I've had before. You move it, and THEN you hear how the cutoff responds differently. You don't hear the differences in resonance directly when you move its slider. Weird. Overall, in my limited playing time, the sounds feel very full. I love having 4 sounds available for any given registration, even more with a hex layer thrown in, switching them in and out is very fun and intuitive. I think the piano is a definite step up from the 7600 (I liked its piano, very serviceable, it just didn't have a lot of character.), its very expressive and fun to play. The electric pianos, from the little i've tried so far, have been a bit dissapointing, but i layered 2 of them together and am good for the moment. I LOVE eps that growl when you bite into the left hand, and that hard to describe voice in the mid range. Anyway, early days, I'll bet there's more patches out there. Organs I've used mostly as pads behind other sounds, haven't explored much yet. Overall though i'm surprised there's not more sound development already present in the preset banks. Probably just a case of this still being early days, but for all the sonic firepower of this board, the preset sound list seems very underpopulated. I'm also not the target audience for the EDM sounds, which seems to be there in great abundance. Where I'd like to go next: Input from y'all would be greatly appreciated on any of this! Have been surprised at the small number of video tutorials and how incomplete the user manual is. What I'd like to learn: - how to sample from the board itself (my laptop is old and funky and i prefer not using computers with music), and trimming/modifying them and assigning them to pads - get rolling with the midi sequencer (this I'm pretty familiar with, just a matter of acquainting myself with Casios way of doing it). - explore what kind of audio i can record with it - understand better what kinds of things this board can do so i can decide which ones i want to learn! What is your vote on things worth getting up to speed on???? - explore the rhythms and find out how to create my own and assign it to auto accompaniment buttons I realize that threre's a number function so you can call up tones directly, but that's not entirely helpful. For example, when I go to the page of piano sounds, it starts on screen 1 and eventually, maybe by screen 8 or 20, you get to where you've stored your modified tones to user slots. How do i get from all their presets directly to where the user tones are stored? My intention is to go through all the presets, find the ones i like and modify them as needed, store everything to user slots, and then not having to look at or deal with the presets anymore. As it is I've got sometimes 20 screens of presets to wade through to get to the user slots. Anyway, those are some of my initial thoughts. Would be curious to see if others felt the way i did, or didn't. Thanks, Randy