Hi.
I'am a new owner o a PSR2000 and here is my quick review. I sold my three years old Roland EM2000 few days ago and bought new PSR2000 (staying with 2000's) for the same money. I have really enjoyed playing EM. It is far more professional oriented keyboard, with excellent sounds and styles and unlimited storing capabilities. I simply wanted something new to have more fun. Now about PSR2000:

Look and layout: it is far from profi look – the look and feel is plastic, but the layout is excellent and very simple to use. Also command keys have a good feel. Everything is preprogrammed to play instantly. Excellent screen - I think even more clear than on PSR9000. Do you know that the new Clavinovas have the same but color screen with double dots (looks great). We will see this on the new PSR10000!?

Sounds: I miss my superior Roland sounds, but I'll get used to new sounds. Piano is too artificial for my taste, but some sounds are really great (some sweet voices, guitares etc.) – some are even better then those on Roland. Amplification and sound from the internal speakers is ok, but not on the level of Roland. Sound editing is very basic. Is there a chance that Yamaha will upgrade OS with the evenlope editing like it was done on PSR9000? Big sound drawback: when you switch a voice or One Touch Setting the previous voice stops playing. This is a serious problem. Is there a way to overcome this?

Styles: in general majority of styles is very useful. Changes in variations are subtle, and thats good. We need »boring« styles. I think It is far more important for arranger keyboard to have good accompaniments – a band playing which is only supporting you as a center of show. A lot of styles on other keyboards are not like this, their sound is too rich – in reality have you ever seen a band on stage with 8 members (channels)? One of the reasons why I changed the keyboard are break fills. So if I summarize: I love the styles. In this couple of days I have found a lot of additional styles on the net. I would like to have few styles from my Roland back. Anybody knows where to find Roland styles for Yamaha with 4 variations? What I have found only have 2 (probably from the times of PSR 8000). Style editing is really simple and effective. I enjoy tweaking the parts with more obscure sounds to get more hype accompaniment.

There are a lot of different settings on this keyboard. I like this, but the manual is very minimalistic although good. Some options are not described at all. For example I was trying to change the style sounds and save it as a new style. In the style editing menus you can only change a sound for one variation (or a fill, intro etc) separately. On PSR 9000 you have a nice PART COPY command. Nothing like this here. I suggest Yamaha to add this on the next OS. Finally I have found it - It is not obvious, but is very simple. You can change style sounds from the main screens and then enter style editor where you save the style. Nothing like this in the manual.

Vocal harmony works well, still when playing loud there is a problem of microphony(?) – whisteling sound? - if microphone is too close to the keyboard. Does anybody have some experience which type of the microphone is good for home use?

Memory: storage for about 20 styles will be enough for me because one of the best thing about this keyboard is direct disk loading. When you put your floppy in you have a list of the styles on it in few seconds. If you want to load a style you just press a key for it and you play it in one or two seconds. Style list stayes there all the time and in practical use It is almost the same as internal or user style handling. I can dare saying that this is very close to hard or zip disk (which I had on my Roland). And after all I was collecting styles for Roland instead of playing them. Who needs more than 50-60 styles which can fit on one floppy? While I am impressed with the disk handling there is a serious drawback: you can not save disk style to performance memory. Yamaha, please add this.

This is all for today. I would appreciate some comments.

Marko