The following are excerpts from postings by OASYS owner Mike Conway. Find all of his postings and talk to him and other OASYS owners at korgforums.com.

Is an OASYS worth £5,500 or $8000? It depends on how many of its features you can use. For someone, like me, I will use most everything, so it's worth more. I think that it has a smooth sound that makes a difference in my music. I love synths and I am excited to talk about my latest one.

As with the open ended Wave Sequencing, I like the fact that ROM waves and new samples can avail themselves to the EXi engines, via wave input. This allows for some truly spectacular modulation possibilities!

The idea of streamlining my workflow is very appealing. For me, that requires an instrument with a lot of effects processors, multiple synthesis types and more. The OASYS' caliber of sound, power and interface is what I've been waiting for.

So, why did I buy an OASYS? I hate computers and mouse-based music. I think I always will. A friend of mine just bought an $18,000 piano. I would not do that, but I do adore synths. If it's within my financial means, then I try to just look at the unit, itself.

Important to me is:

• DISPLAY - (I like them large. Touchscreens are even better!)
  
• INTERFACE - (I like lots of knobs and sliders - that's the advantage of hardware.)
  
• PROGRAMMABILITY - (I love deeeep synths. I want something that will keep me busy for years and give me some sounds that others don't have.)
  
• EASY ACCESSIBILITY - (I don't want to mess with computers, dongles and huge sample libraries. I like to turn something on and have my sounds and FX, right there.)
  
• HARD DRIVE - (Loved this on my E4K. I wanted my next board to have a larger, faster drive to store all of my samples/songs and not be slow about loading them.)

So, the OASYS came out and I also hated the price and posted my share of disapproval. I was hoping it would be around $4,000 - $5,000, but it wasn't. I continued to study it, though...

I was used to buying flagships, like the Yamaha TX816 ($5,000), the SY99 ($4,000) and my expanded E-MU E4K ($3,600). I want the most features I can get out of any manufacturer, so I don't even bother with their smaller spinoffs.

Of course, comparatively, the OASYS blows by anything that I've owned. I'm partial to huge pads and lots of FX processors. I did the comparisons to the Fusion, Motif, Fantom and Triton line.

As you know from a lot of my past posts, I really, really like the OASYS. It has a lot of EQs and some big, beautiful sounds, even at the Program level. The modulation mixers, step sequencers, etc. make it really powerful. I don't think it's for everybody, though, especially the VST crowd. It could certainly use some more sample expansions, like an orchestral pack. Nothing else has this kind of Wave Sequencing, and the next generation KARMA is a biggie.

As with the open ended Wave Sequencing, I like the fact that ROM waves and new samples can avail themselves to the EXi engines, via wave input. This allows for some truly spectacular modulation possibilities!

The idea of streamlining my workflow is very appealing. For me, that requires an instrument with a lot of effects processors, multiple synthesis types and more. The OASYS' caliber of sound, power and interface is what I've been waiting for.