the real difficulty in giving an honest answer to this question is that it is very very difficult to get your hands on a PA800 unless you have placed an order to buy one. Virtually zero music shops in my area stock any and there are none on any shop floors in the second largest city in the UK. However i have been looking extensively at the Pa800 as a PA1X owner and i have upgraded my instrument to the new Version 3 for the PA1X. I have also just today downloaded onto my PA1X all the PA800 styles. So my answer to your question now that i have virtually a new keyboard is there is very little difference between the instruments . However there is potentially a big difference depending on how you use the instruments.

let me explain

the PA800 has 64mb of sampling ram which means that the PA800 can handle larger samples than its lder brother . If you are into sampling then this could be a major difference as it means that you now have a wider choice of available commercial samples. The PA1x has only 32mb and that can be quite limiting in terms of purchaseing newer samples.

The PA800 has greater polyphony (128 notes) which means that you can have much deeper layering of sounds without note drop off. If you are into sound creation then this is really important as both he PA1X (after V3 update) and the Pa800 are capable of layering up to 16 separate tones at the same time to create some of the most complex and detail sounds heard on any keyboard. Obviously the PA1X only has 62 notes polyphony and that could be eaten up quite quickly if you used 16 different tones all at once even with the Korgs clever algorithms to reduce note drop out. Obviously the PA800 wont suffer quite as quickly with its 128 note polyphony.

It is hard to tell how many styles and sounds in the PA800 actually use more than 2-4 tones per sound in reality despite its potential to use up to 16.I think the RX piano uses the most and many of those are damper samples,harmonic resonances etc

However in terms of styles, fillins etc the PA1X upgraded and the PA800 are virtually the same.

So the difference between the two instruments could be marginal or quite large depending on how you use the instrument.

From what i understand the vocal harmoniser on the PA800 is a cut down version of the PA1X, the speaker system on the PA800 is a less powered version of the PA1X and the missing sliders on the PA800 means that the instrument is inferior in a live performance situation to the PA1X.

I hope this helps

[This message has been edited by Spalding1 (edited 03-04-2007).]