First Impressions

We have had a few hours to fool around on our new OAX700 and we are starting to get a feel of how things are setup. At this point we know enough to be dangerous regarding basic navigation of the instrument. We love the unit and are very happy with our move from a single keyboard instrument back to a full console organ and going with a Wersi product.

In no particular order some of our early observations:

1. Takes quite a long time to boot up.
2. We know it’s really a PC under the covers but it’s still a little odd to hear the sounds of a cooling fan running over on the right side of the console.
3. Due to space constraints we opted for internal speakers. Upon initial power up and picking a preset or two, the overall sound was not all that impressive. After some poking around under “Settings” we found additional input and output level controls along with EQ settings that can be adjusted to your taste. I don’t think we have the perfect settings configured just yet, but we have improved the sound quality considerably with a couple of quick changes there. Others have found the same thing.
4. OAX 1.3 is the latest and greatest. Our instrument came with that version already installed. That’s good news but the online help / user manual installed on the instrument is for OAX 1.01-01 Revision 1 September 2014. Better than nothing but it sure would be nice to have the latest version of the manual pre-installed. There is a later version of the manual available online but still nothing in support of OAX 1.3 available that we are aware of – Anyone??
5. Along the same lines, there is a remote control attached inside the instrument to control the color and light pattern on the music stand. Found the manual, it’s current, but in German! 🙁 We are working on getting that at least partially translated with the help of some other folks. (Thanks Bill!).
6. We were not surprised to find there are still a number of places were German shows up vs. English, especially as you drill down into some of the edit/program screens. As I recall, it took a number of revisions of our Spectra to get to a pure English version.
7. We started out by simply going through some of the “Factory” presets. Quite a few use “Strings1” or something similar to that on the Lower manual. Would be nice to see a little more variety in some of those presets. Good thing it’s easy to setup your own presets – Who uses factory presets anyway? 🙂
8. Keyboards have a nice feel to them. Slightly weighted. Not the touch of an acoustic piano nor is that what we would we want that on this type of instrument. Overall, “just right” for us.
9. Found the two drawbar modules (OX7 and VB3) interesting and fun to play with.
10. Import of MP3, WAV and MIDI files is a simple process.
11. Editing of a MIDI sequence (New in OAX 1.3):
    1. We were able to change instruments, mute and change volume levels on various tracks. All easy to to do and worked as expected.
12. Also new in 1.3 is the import of sheet music. Most of those screens are still in German and it took a bit of trail-n-error to import. Once done, you can load the music and store it as part of a preset. We started a project some months back to ever so slowly digitize most of the music we have. Guess this means we need to get back to work on that.
13. One other new feature in 1.3 is “Data-Backup“. Tried it out by creating a user preset and then making a backup. Next, deleted that user preset. Performed the restore and our user preset was back. Something that needs to be done on a regular basis to be of value, but well worth your time. It would take quite a bit of effort to re-program all of your favorite sounds, settings, etc.. And that assumes you could even remember all the things that you changed over time.

Enough for now. Back to our early comment – We love the unit and are very happy to be playing a Wersi product again.