Hi All
Have been reading the posts and it seems a lot of people are looking for 76 Key arrangers, well there is one available that is due for a major software update, (August 2005) which I think might interest you, the keyboard has been featured in previous posts but as the new software makes it a virtually new instrument, I think its worth mentioning it again, and that is the Wersi Ikarus.

Briefly in current form it is a 76 key keyboard with a large touch screen display, (which is adjustable to at least 45 degrees) DVD rom/CD burner drive, floppy drive, 80Gb hard disk, 1Gb of memory and AMD CPU, all mounted in a lightweight aluminium case.
Up to 45 sounds can be mapped to each sound button, 2000 Total Presets (Patches) of which 1500 are user programmable, Up to 45 Styles, Real Drums, (Live recordings of a real drummer playing Real Drums in a studio setting) mp3, Wav, Midi and/or Video can be mapped to each style button.

Updates in the V7 software (August 2005) include: -
300 New Sounds
5 Sound Generators, Analog, Wavetable, FM, Sampling and Drawbars.
All New Additional Synth/Vintage Sounds
Disk Streaming of sounds (Using Gigasampler technology)
170 Note additional Polyphony
Hermod Tuning (Optional)
Improved Sound Editor
100 New Styles and Real Drums
New Effects, Reverb, Chorus, Wha Wha, Distortion, Flanger, Compressor etc
VST Instrument integration allowing 4 VST Instruments (Soft Synths) to be used at any one time (Pictures show Steinberg’s THE GRAND and HALion sampler on the screen, also Native Instruments B4 and FM7)
Style Presets – For easy play style presets couple with one-touch settings for easy setup of instrument
New Part sequencer – Allows looping and arranging of Midi files (Cubasis and Wavelab will still be integrated)
Additional features may be added before launch.
Existing owners can upgrade for 198 Euros. (May require upgrade of memory and/or CPU)
No demos available as yet, and details only in German, but expect the Demos and English translation to arrive in August.

I would be interested in the experienced members comments on this upgrade.

As for stability, I play the Wersi Abacus and apart from minor bugs in the OAS software, (which was fixed by free update CD ROMs form Wersi) I have had no other problems at all.

Bill