I take it that the non-WPC ones are purely patches without adding PCMs to the unit, and so if I can attain those banks purely as sysex I’d be fine in that department. I’m currently being offered from a private seller to purchase the following Wavestation sound cards: Its not a big deal once you know whats going on but it could be a case for getting an EX to begin with. still I usually try to load another known patch bank over the 'corrupt 'bank & sometimes it works, but usually not. Just turn WS upside down ,remove the 20 or whatever screws & the bottom panel,, locate & remove the battery cell for a few minutes, then put it back ( or replace if necessary) & the W.S. The solution was /can be a bit of a hassle, but is straightforward. When this happened to me the first time I was alarmed, but some of the SOS WS gurus & original patch designers helped me out by explaining that the problem was caused by me unwittingly loading WS EX patches into my original WS, & the fact that it didnt have the waveforms in the patches borked it. actually 'sieze', stop working & fail to boot!

One thing to note if you are loading Sysex patches ( banks from internet etc) certain banks can make the W.S. The original aesthetic/ design was fine/ perfect imo, but the A/D with the inputs for using input sources in wave sequencing sounds like a very interesting proposition as well as the vocoder which is supposed to be decent. Korg only added the extra waves because 'the people' were clamoring for piano & drum sounds ,which is what they ('the people') all seemed to want in the early 90s.

unless you wanted the extra (cheese mostly imho) samples. I would say apart from the extra vocoder efx in the EX personally there isnt any advantage over the original W.S. I need a new display or to disengage the inverter. I have the original keyboard (since the late 90s) & still havn't fixed my display whine, it doesnt affect the signal though. On either of the keyboards, be prepared for the display inverter whine racket, you may be lucky & find one that has a new or modded display that fixes this noisy & tiresome issue.

Wavestation ex