I think that it wins in a few different departments and most importantly, the keys. In my personal opinion, I would take the Roland FA 08. The VAST synth engine is also the staple for Kurzweil’s and I have to agree, there’s an infinite amount that you can do with it in terms of sound design. The Kurzweil PC4 has an all-new 6 – operator FM engine with the ability to import FM SysEx files and more. If you go this route, you can easily lay down demos on your PC4 and then use a DAW to lay down the real track. I actually use my FA 08 as a controller about 95% of the time. If you’re not a fan of workstations, you can simply run this as a MIDI controller. If you’re a beginning piano student, you can easily tweak sounds to your liking without having to create your own. I’ve been feeling this way with workstations as of lately, however, creating patches is where the Kurzweil PC4 really excels. One thing I have to say is that a lot of the presets don’t, in my opinion, compare to what you can get with VSTS. The lush pads are definitely the strongest part of the sounds. Some people say aftertouch is over-rated, whereas others absolutely love it. The key-bed is velocity-sensitive with aftertouch and this is important to me as well as many other pianists. With this being said, I play a Roland FA 08 that I love. The keys just don’t compare to that of a Roland to me. The key-bed on Kurzweil’s has never been to my personal liking. I’ve found other workstations to be difficult at first to navigate and this isn’t the case. The size of the interface is ideal and it also is very easy to navigate. The interface is a 4.3′ LCD display that has six soft keys underneath. There’s a 16-track sequencer that now has riff generation as well as step sequencing with MIDI CC recording. I recently wrote about some of my favorite keyboard workstations in this roundup here. The initial PC4 is being advertised as 88 fully-weighted hammer-action keys, however, it is expected to also be available in 76 and 61 keys. As far as controls go, they have been expanded with a row of knobs to go hand in hand with the faders. It comes in with 1000 presets, the VAST synth engine, 256 notes of polyphony, 6 – operator FM synthesizer, and a beautiful interface.
The Kurzweil PC4 is an extremely powerful workstation that has taken a big leap forward from its previous generation.