Most people that drive Ford's don't have much experience with Ferrari's! Wersi and Bohm are priced FAR beyond the reach of most gigging players. Let's face it Abacus, you're the ONLY user I can ever recall on this forum! Being such a niche brand and targeted at a niche player, I imagine there's one main English language Wersi/Bohm user group and most of you spend your time there.

Massively expensive, very heavy, technically beyond most hobbyist arranger players' reach, it's easier to think of them as home organs for the wealthy amateur (or organ pro) than a serious contender in the arranger market as we know it.

I already addressed about Korg... no new mid line model for SEVEN YEARS, and a tragically buggy and incomplete TOTL model that has taken over three years to even be comparable to its predecessor! That's not the behavior of any brand that WANTS to be in the segment...

Most of us are old enough to remember the rapid decline of the home organs. One day they were everywhere, the next no one would touch them with a barge pole, completely irrelevant for playing the contemporary music of the day. And therein lies the rub...

We can sit on our porches mumbling about how kids today aren't into music, but the massive sales of stage keyboards and synth workstations says otherwise (not to mention software instruments that run on mini computers or tablets!). What the kids AREN'T into is playing dated keyboards with barely 5% of their content aimed at their generation.

Look, WE are the generation that abandoned organs. Try to remember why we did... Truth is, they sucked at 70's/80's pop music! So we moved on. I imagine there were a bunch of crusty old diehard organ players back then moaning about how the kids (that was us!) not playing any more, but what they were REALLY complaining about was the kids not playing JUST LIKE THEM..!

The collapse of the arranger segment is driven from the bottom, not the top. You could still buy five figure home organs long after the base models were discontinued. But it was the high volume low cost organs that made the companies survive, and without that base, manufacturer after manufacturer went broke or moved on to synths, and all that's left is uber-expensive niche organs designed for those with a costly taste for nostalgia. Almost no one is GIGGING one!

The way the home organ faded away is being mirrored today. Ketron don't make ANY mid-line arrangers (and forget about low-line!), Korg haven't made one for seven years, Roland are gone completely and that leaves Yamaha.

But Korg and Roland have robust sales of just about every OTHER type of keyboard... stage pianos, synths, Hammond clones, workstations, software synths, home digital pianos, you name it. The kids haven't stopped playing. They just stopped playing hokey old arrangers..!

I keep going on about this, but most of us wouldn't buy an arranger that 95% of its styles were for hiphop, trap, jungle, glitch etc (most of us have no idea what those genres even sound like, let alone name a bunch of hit songs in the style!). And most kids aren't interested in buying anything loaded up with swing and bossa novas and bigband stuff..!

Arrangers are being designed for US, the survivors, the few, not the kids. And we're not enough to keep the investment and innovation going. I think we've seen the last of Korg, Roland's gone, Ketron is heading in Wersi's direction. There's always a last man standing, and unsurprisingly it's Yamaha. But for how long?

All I can say is, I'm glad I have TWO BK9's, and I'm stocking up on spare parts while they're still available!