Hello Miguel, Andrea and Tapas,

I must say I am surprised and intrigued about this Musikant discussion and in particular about Miguel wanting to swap his 500 for the 800 plus Musikant stick ..
Allow me a short history of my own.
In May last year I bought the PA-500 not having the means to fork out on the PA-800 or PA-2X at the time. As many know I started reprogramming the Performances and they were on offer to all and sundry. In the process we tried to adept my resources for the PA-800 and discovered that although things did work out, the PA-800 had substantially more multisamples and much better amplification. ( and better DACs as was recently pointed out).
I was particularly disappointed with some of the basic drum samples and after having heard the PA-500Musikant demo I swapped my PA-500 for the Musikant version, the price difffence by then was marginal, at least here in Holland.
Basically of course the ONLY difference between the two are 40 extra multisamples. Most of these (well over 20, cover organ settings). And there are some improved trumpet and clarinet samples and..........some truly better drum samples noticably for the snare drums.

The performances were also better, but have meanwhile been improved significantly by myself, to which many can meanwhile testify, and the onboard styles are mainly geared to the German market. However they do include great golden oldies, etc.etc.

My point ?

First of all, all of these styles, some with minor alterations, should play very well on the PA-800 and PA-2X without having to purchase the Musikant stick.
And unless you really dig Schlagers, Polkas and Tangos it is hardly worth bothering.

More importantly though, I cannot imagine that the 40 added samples are not largely already covered by the standard multisamples in the PA-800 and PA-2X. This is the real issue really of whether or not one should need this stick in addition to These two top models.
But I am looking forward to hearing from Dreamer whether this is the case or not.

best wishes,
John Smies
Holland