Hi - V .. re your question ... Why i bought the EK50, well initially as a holiday board, like i said mainly for size weight and price.
It is an old sound chip in a new board from the PA50 ... little on it as an 'arranger' but VERY VERY plug and play
I SORT OF FELL IN LOVE WITH AN ENTRY BOARD OF ALL THINGS ....lol .... The voice and style selection is stunning and there is a 10 x 4 registration bank to save sets easily to.
3 upper voices ....no less! and ALL settings can be changed on the fly...... all for under £300 ....plus very decent on-board speakers, joy stick, audios out and a very respectable keybed to boot!
Not at all a Korg PA in use ....ie...difficult. This little animal I recon is VERY Yamaha in it's OS, so easy , so suits me as i am VERY plug and play and hate messing with parameters....I simply want to play....end of
The only negative i would say is because it is so cheap they have had to multi task some, well many of the controls, but a bit of bed time reading soon solved that .
I liked it so, so much I bought a couple more of them.
I then stuck one on top of Genos - saved 40 keyboard sets on it for upper voices ( some layered with the 3 voices available ) , Using the split function I used the lower voice setting for 40 more solo voices ( as lower is only a single voice ) . Simply changed and saved the octave to suit each, to provide 10 x 4 x 2 registrations (=80 no less ) offering great sounding voices in differing instrument cats. to jump from the lower board up to 'on the fly' and of course you can use ANY board as a master board and simply attach one lead ( headphone out and audio in on other ....easy as pie )
I will be keeping it for SURE to use with the SX
B ....re your Q.... I use Price Spy ALL THE TIME I wont buy anything without checking that site out!! I had been watching Chamberlains on there for a few weeks at £1644 so I screen shot their ad. at that and my local shop did it for me at that! Last week Chamberlains added the 6% so i see it is around £1750 now with them, so i did ok. do check price Spy out and you can get alerts, look at price history etc....a GREAT site ....well i think so, another good one is Price Runner.
Regards - Keith