John C,

NO and NO to both of your inquiries. These new keyboards are only a cheeper version of the top of the line technics. The quality of construction is still very good as well as quality of the styles and sounds. Just some of the features have been left out to reduce the cost. The amp and speakers are not as powerful and full bodied as the 7000 but still very good. A cost factor then again. The custom area for the storage of 20 styles or rhythms other than the factory ones has been eliminated. Another cost factor. However the 24 can store all of these on a floppy as they always were able to do to be loaded into the composer at will. The 2600 however has the new SD card technology same as the 7000 to store all of these things for instant recall. Great, great improvement over the hard disk and floppy disk and at no extra cost to us. Wonderful! I would suspect this might eliminate the need for the customs storage area altogether in the future new keyboards. The styles stored in the customs section when recalled are treated the same as the standard inboard resident styles and rhythms. When using the MSA (music style arranger) there are four variations that will also trigger four different sets of voicings along with progressively enhanced variation of the style. When recalling these from the SD card the voicings are loaded into the first four panel memories instead of the four variation buttons. However the variation buttons can be told to trigger one of the first four panel memory buttons thereby no difference in operation. There also is an advantage to this method. The panel memory has eight slots for voiceings instead of only four. So in essence, the 24, (the cheapest) has the older floppy technology, the 26 (middle line of cost) has the SD card and no floppy but rather USB or card reader through computer and the top of line 7000 has everything, even built in dust cover. Hope this might be of some help. If not we will try again.

Grandpa Doug