The keyboard has been reliable and solid over the years, with only the occasional battery change. There are a ton of great patches available, many of them are quite old now. Sure, the iOS version is fantastic and makes editing a dream however, for pure playing pleasure, the original wins hands down. I've played on and owned the software versions but there is something about the sound of the hardware version that I prefer.probably to do with the digital to analog converters. I actually fired it up last night and was running it through a smallish bass amp. The last PCM card set for the original WS was the Drum card, which I don't have, but all this stuff is in the Digital Edition, which I've been meaning to pick up for a while now.I bought the original Wavestation when it first came out in 1990 and still own it. PS I got my Synth/Timeslice set by queueing for a few hours in the Turnkey Midnight Sale, for £20, which was a great find and well worth it! I also have the Piano set which was generously donated to me for free as the original user didn't want it anymore - it's similar to the M1 piano and the piano in the later Wavestation EX, but is different to both (I actually quite like it in that M1-piano kind of way).

The synth/timeslice in particular is rare and sought after, though less so now because the Korg Legacy Digital Edition includes this stuff (but not in the WS version in the original Legacy Collection), and has some nice synth waves and is probably my favourite bank collection out of all of the ones I've tried. None of this PCM data was included on later WS versions, though they did repurpose this data onto the newer O1/w-type PCM cards for the Wavestation SR. The second kind, the Synth/Timeslice set and the Piano set are worth more, as they are combined performance/patch/WS data together with PCM sample data.

The first kind are simple banks of performance/patch/WS data, and aren't worth that much, as the data is available elsewhere.

Korg wavestation ex card