Like Don Mason, I live in Shreveport, and have a pretty good idea which stores he referred to in his post. (The store with the KN6000, BTW, has just put it on “sale” for “only” $3495!)

What he describes about competent music stores working hard to demo a new unit only to have the customer milk them for info then go buy it on the Internet or at Circuit City echoes what used to happen with early personal computers such as the Commodore 64. The C64 got popular because of the expertise of dedicated computer stores (remember those?), but once they had blazed the trail, Commodore started selling them to department stores at prices so low that said chains could sell them for less than the computer stores could buy them! There was no way they could stay in business. How’s that for gratitude? Note that Commodore enjoyed a brief surge in popularity as a result of those actions, but where is it today? Gone. I think Æsop told a fable about this — something about killing a goose that laid yellow metallic eggs.

To add insult to injury, very often people would come into such a store, ask lots of questions, take up valuable time with demos, and then go buy at the deparment store (the Internet didn’t exist yet). And then they would have the gall to come back and ask the computer store to help them out with questions and support that the department store (of course) couldn’t do! A similar situation happened with the mid-range line of Yamaha PSRs (3#0–5#0 models): people would come into the music store Don and I like, play around with them, then go buy one at Service Merchandise or on the Internet at prices far lower than the music store could possibly offer. Often the same people would then come back and expect to get support from the music store!

Anyway, during this time, I came up with an idea and told it to the owner of one of the few Commodore-only computer stores at the time. It may apply here as well. The basic idea is to offer excellent post-sales service and support free to anyone who purchases at your store. You will answer their questions, help them set it up, etc. Most of you probably do this anyway. Now here’s the kicker: also offer this same support package to anyone who comes into your store, takes up your time, then goes and buys off the Net or wherever, and then comes back and expects support, let them have it — at a price. Oh, I’d say twice to thrice as much as they “saved” by buying elsewhere would be fair. This would more than make up for your lost profit. Once they paid this, you consider them as if they had bought it at your store. And make it clear that the same deal will happen with the next model they want to buy: they get the support free if they buy it from you, or else they have to pay much more than they would “save” if they didn’t, to get the same level of support. It doesn’t take a math whiz to see which would be the better deal for them.

On the original topic re: polyphony: the answers given here were very good. I just wanted to make it plain that the polyphony is counted by tone generating element, not by note, and as has been stated, most keyboards have many (if not most) voices using more than one element per note for a “phatter” sound. Only thin solo sounds (such as, say, a solo oboe) are likely to use a single element. Also, the elements remain in use from the time a note begins until the time it has totally finished sounding, which, in the case of a sustained sound such as a piano with damper pedal down, chimes, guitar, etc., can be a substantial amount of time after you have released the key! This is why arpeggios with sustain can very quickly eat up your polyphony! When a device runs out of polyphony, it usually stops the least-recently-released notes first, on the idea that their sustains would’ve decayed further and so hopefully they’re already so soft by then that their sudden stop wouldn’t be too noticeable. Of course, this may not always be the case: different sounds have different delay times. In country music, you may have an acoustic guitar and a banjo both playing arpeggiated “picking” chord patterns. But the guitar has a much longer sustain than the banjo, so if the above rule is used, then guitar notes may be cut off even when they“re still much louder than more recently-released banjo notes! Smarter keyboards would take that into account, and drop the ones whose amplitudes have faded the most, regardless of how long it has been since they were released (or even if they had not been released at all: instruments such as guitars, pianos, etc. will eventually fade all the way to silence even if you never release the key!).