Donny,

I agree with your observation. Here is my take on this:

When Tyros was unveiled, it looked like a new instrument, which had gotten most things right. While some people, including myself, were complaining about the fact that some of the features of the 9000Pro were not in the Tyros, it appeared (at least from the printed specs) that Yamaha had addressed all of the basic requirements of the players (user-friendliness, number of sounds, styles, polyphony, etc.) Yamaha had been very consistnt in their product line before that (PSR 7000, 8000, 9000 all worked rather similarly, and rather well). We could see from the specs that Tyros was an improvement on a good thing, which accounts for all the welcome buzz.

Korg's PA1X, on the other hand, is same old same old. Korg has a pretty poor history in arranger keyboard design. They abandoned a good design of i30 and went to a dismally bad design of PA80. I, and surely many others, were expecting the revival of the i30 user interface with the better features of the PA series, such as sounds and styles, plus the new sound engine to handle more polyphony, in keeping with the leading edge of today's technology. Instead we are seeing the combination of bad interface of the PA80 with the touch screen (much decried for live use), along with the antiquated sound engine which is short on polyphony. Its sample RAM is only expandable to 32MB - my three-year old PDA has more memory than that. While I don't use sampling, this is another example of Korg intentionally handicapping the arranger keyboard.

In other words, we are expressing our disappointment with Korg. The specs of the PA1X may be adequate for a mid-range instrument, like PA80, but not for the "flagship", retailing for over $3000.

Regards,
Alex