This synth is formed - through an act of what some might say was questionable design sense - from a very robust, heavy body and far less robust plastic end panels of the brittle variety. You can probably see where this is going now... As a result of this weakness (and quite possibly barbaric handling) the first two WSA1s that I received had their ends smashed well beyond repair by couriers. The third had a non-functioning disk drive and the fourth, which I still have today, has minor intermittent disk drive problems - sometimes refusing to format disks and killing 6 or so before a good format.

I personally find most of the sounds very thin - though - as argued elsewhere here - this need not always be a bad thing. The output seems very weak compared to my Supernova, Virus and Akai - and I have to sacrifice a little signal to noise quality to use it. I find (with a few exceptions) the sounds to be on the plastic side - and evolving sounds can - without considerable care - sound very badly dated - like something of the M1 era.

It very occasionally works for me in a mix but most of the time I find that it is really not worth the effort. The drum kits, in the main, tend towards very realistic, bright metallic percussion - and, whereas I can see that they could be good for some musical styles - they're useless to me.

Some surprising quality can occasionally be found on sub bass - as per comments on the sine elsewhere here. The weighted keyboard feels great and I use it as my master keyboard - more often than not ignoring the internal sounds (other than one outstanding subby bass drum in one of the kits). Having said that - it has a sound called "adult contemporary piano" which I personally find to be an exceptionally good piano for a dark 20th century classical sound (though a piano was probably the last thing in the world I had bought the synth for.)

All in all I felt that this was a poor buy - to me it sounds much closer to a home keyboard than a real synth.

I worked for Roland UK at the time and my studio was full of JV's etc but the WSA always got used the most. The cards are impossible to get, i went as far as contacting Panasonic in Japan through a very reliable contact and they'd gotton rid of them in a panicked sell out to a US retailer when they discovered the synth was not selling and they thought they were going to get dumped with a load of useless add-ons.

If you want something different but still very useful in a workhorse way then get it, i wish i still had mine, software just isn't the same....;0(

Good Sound quality (better than my 38kHz Morpheus), good keyboard action, and a sequencer that makes more sense than most software-based suites (although it is a lot more simplified).

I love it, still use it and would recomend it to anyone who takes the time to get to know what their latest purchase is truly capable of.

Bless.