I had a little window of opportunity to go into my local dealer and have a brief play on a SX 900. I took a USB stick along to see how well my Tyros 3 registrations and midi files sounded.

All midi files sounded fine. All embedded voice selections worked. Lyric display fine.

All registrations loaded and operated as expected.

I don't use styles so cannot comment on how compatible they are.

More generally...

Sounds pretty good through the internal speakers and the Yamaha recommended subwoofer. The stereo sound field was very nice.

I found menu navigation pretty easy.

The keybed is definitely a Firmed up PSR type and not a budget FSX but feels fine to me. Nevertheless if you don't like the old PSR keybed I don't think this would change your opinion.

As reported elsewhere using the fast / slow rotary effect switch produces an abrupt change for a lot of the organ patches, although not for organ flute patches. I commented on this to a passing member of staff who advised that this is due to the speed change being implemented by switching sample sets rather than using the inbuilt rotary effect. Sounds like a good explanation to me but that doesn't stop it sounding a bit naff! The organ flute patches tend to use an effect block for the rotary speaker and so do not hiccup. The change didn't seem as a abrupt if you use the joystick.

I could see the entire screen easily from a standard seated position, I'm just under 6 feet. It did not seem washed out of seriously degraded when K moved from standing to seated. I could easily see the bottom line of the screen when seated.

Some of the text is rather small.

A pleasant bonus - I say that because I couldn't find this specific setting in the reference manual - is that you can assign "Show Lyrics" "Show score" and "Show text" to the assignable buttons.

In summary I'd be happy to take this keyboard and my usb stick to a gig with minimal preparation and he confident that it would do a really good job. Obviously optimising my registrations and midi files for the new keyboard would make things even better. The only thing I'd miss is the sliders but the touch screen mixer is pretty usable.

Thanks to Hamiltons (Preston UK) for letting me play on the keyboard for a while without being in my face trying to sell things. They were not aware that I would be posting this summary nor that I would mention them in it.