I'd like to know if the synth engine and the quality of sounds in GEM WK6 and Equinox are the same.....

The Equinox and WK6 are really miles apart. There are some of the same sounds found in both keyboards, but the engine and the way they work are really quite different. The Equinox is more a "synth" and the WK6 is more an "arranger". Many customers come in expecting to see styles and patterns in the equinox and once they don't they are disapointed. If you want to create everything from scratch, that is what the equinox is all about. The WK8 SE and the equinox pro both share the ProPiano1 voice set of 32 sounds now. I'm pretty sure than when the equinox first came out and I personally didn't like it's display and thought there weren't enough good acoustic instrument sounds, I was told by Generalmusic that the equinox has the same sound chip as the WK, but in my listening, I thought it didn't sound the same. I don't know if I'm wrong or right about this.
George Kaye

Hi,

When you read about Equinox, you get the impression that this is the best synth you can ever buy. I am not disputing nor confirming this. I do not know. I am not a synth guy. I like my instruments to be classical and very realistic.

The second impression I get is that you can modify, adjust, and tweek the sound more in Equinox. Look at the number of envelopes and filters they provide compared to WK6/8. So here is the question, is it that WK6 can potentially have the same quality sound as Equinox (or vice versa) but the samples loaded happen to have different quality... OR... Both engines have different quality of voices?

I agree with George. It is very hard to compare two instruments when they offer different sets of sounds. I mean How can you compare two engines by comparing a flute sound versus space vibration sample?

Sorry George, but I cannot resist repeating this. *smile* Please forgive me. *grin* Piano PRO2 voice is the best that GEM has. But is not better than say Yamaha P80 and no way no earth it comes close to Yamaha Clavinova (which in the future I may buy just for the sake of piano sound unless other manufacturers do something about it). When a person buys a keyboard with an 88 action-weighted keyboard, what they have in mind is an excellent piano sound. Given that expectation, SK880 has an unacceptable piano sound. The right thing GEM should do is work on a hardware upgrade that will upgrade those keyboards to REALPIANO2. realpiano1 is not acceptable in my humble opinion. George, forgive me for repeating this, but I am hoping that one of GEM executives will read this and will understand what is going on.