Hi there - well heres some info about the abacus. The basic model costs 3,599 in the Uk that includes all of the inbuilt sounds, styles, features, CD rom drive, hard drive etc. the options are as follows, real drums around £450. Internal speakers - Around £200, Vocaliser - around £180, cd writer - around £250. Plus a 2nd manual is available and also extra memory at a very competitive price. You have a 20 gig hard drive for sampling, storing wavs mp3s, presets, sounds maps etc. Talking of preset registrasions, You can store several thousand on to a floppy so just think how many you can store on a 20Gig hard disk!
I use my abacus for giging out at concerts and at night clubs with my band and use it around 3 times a week playing out. There is no problem with the Windows OS. The Wersi software has been made and partially designed by Microsoft in Germany and all drivers have been fine tuned so that it does not effect the windows and nothing crashes. Wersi give a detailed explanation of why PC's crash. The only time the abacus will malfunction is if one of the boards blow! All of the data handling is done by Wersi super fast processor - used in conjunction with the Pentium 4 processor. The Pentium can't handle all of the constant wave data and so there fore Wersi created a board which has the equivilent of 6 Pentium 4 processors. called the SG10. All Abacus keyboards come with them as standard.
I will try and get some demo MP3s up soon. till then, keep playing!

Robert

Thanks Robert:
Very imformative. I take it the price is $3599 as in "pounds" right? Because if it were dollars I would probably order one tomorrow, but I know better. I may decide to sell a couple of my RC helicopters to make up for the diference between a Tyros and the Abacus. I live in New Jersey and there is a Wersi dealership in Lancaster Pa. about a 2 1/2 hr. ride from where I live. I think is worth a day's trip to listen to this "beast".
I still would like to find out what the actual weight w/ or w/o speakers is, sorry to be a Pain?
Thanks again.
Mario

I'd love to hear the styles on this unit. Does anyone have demos?

Hi there, with regards to the speakers,there isn't much of a difference with or without them - I don't know the exact weight - but the internal speakers run off of the internal amp - which is in the keyboard whether you have speakers or not - so the only difference is the actual speaker cones and fittings. THis is the heaviest keyboard i've come across though - due to the fact thats it's made from very sturdy steel, wood and plastic. All consoles are metal - unlike a lot fo other manufacturers. P.S. I'm working on the demo mp3's! & how do I post pictures on here?

Bye for now,

Robert

Robert,

All I can say is, "WOW"!

Steve