I enjoy the sound of my new 2100. The Live!GrandPiano is very nice, more mellow than the 2000 GrandPiano. I also like the new Live!JazzGuitar and the Cool!JazzOrgan. The new Live!ClassicGuitar makes a very good left-hand accompaniment voice. The new Sweet!Harmonica is a voice I will use a lot. Sweet!Violin sounds very nice as do the Sweet!Oboe, but for the music I play, like Beakybird, I won't use them that much. I'm not impressed with the Sweet!Flugelhorn and the various Sweet Brass sounds. Why we have Live Harpsichords is beyond me. I never think of the harpsichord when selecting voices.

Some of the additional styles are nice, but these keyboards have a large number of styles available that can be loaded direct from floppy -- and the floppy versions can be adjusted as desired by the user and saved that way. So, I give less weight to the internal styles.

I believe the extra memory will be useful. Instead of having only a couple of dozen styles in the USER area, I can put perhaps twice that many there. Adding that to a floppy disk full of "favorites" and that will provide for 50-70 external styles easily available -- quite an improvement over the 3 USER styles in the earlier keyboards. I haven't hooked up the USB port yet -- the manual gives all kinds of cautions about the order of turning things on with that port in use and I don't know if there is much of an advantage. A midi cable connection can be used to connect to a PC. As for copying files, there isn't a hard drive in there, a floppy can transfer files to the available USER area easily and quickly.

So what's it all worth? The keyboard cost the same as the 2000 and has more features. The 2000 was a great buy for the money and the 2100 is even better. If you have the 2000, and sell it, you can offset the cost of the 2100. So you compare that cost with the new features. If Yamaha had provided significant new capabilities -- like a "smart card" capability or hard disk capability, many owners would "upgrade" from the 2000. But they didn't. I suspect if you are ready for a big step up, then the Tyros would be the option. I have never heard a Tyros live, but the mega voices should add more realism to the voices & styles, it has lots more styles and voices, it has a hard drive. But it also has many voices that are available on the 2100. My guess is that the common voices will sound much the same -- again a demonstration of the value of the 2x00 series. And, the Tyros costs three times as much. Since I am maintaining the psrtutorial site, which focuses on the 2000, I felt somewhat obliged to get the 2100. But it is not at all like my previous upgrade (from 540 to 2000). My bottom line, as a 2000 owner, I'm happy with the new 2100, but not overly impressed.