Donny,

I think this has mostly happened due to Technics' antiquated sales policies: the dealers had protected territories, they were not allowed to advertize or sell by mail, and they were allowed to charge whatever the market would bear. Walking into a Technics store here in Phoenix is always an aggravation, especially when the salesman tells you that the price of KN7000 is $7000, but "today only" they'd give me a deal of a lifetime of only $5000. The company has lost its business sense - this practice may have been fine for pianos (charging comparable prices to real pianos), but a keyboard is not a piece of art, as a real piano is.

Technics was one of the innovators in the field of arrangers, and their latest instruments do contain some nice features. However, with all the niceties, their instruments are not that much better than other high-end arrangers (e.g. Tyros) to justify twice the price.

I know that many of the folks here are fortunate to find dealers with less predatory prices, but the above situation repeats itself every time I make my way into a local Technics store (it happened 6 years ago when I was thinking about KN5000, then again when I went to look at the KN6000, and then again recently with the 7000 - funny thing, though, they kept quoting me the same prices every time). Couple that with a less than knowledgeable salesperson, who hovers around me while I try to play, and after a while becomes annoyed that I am taking too much of his time, and there is the reason why I have never acquired the taste for Technics enough to look for a mail-order dealer.

I suspect that I am not the only one who feels this way about Technics, which is one of the reasons why their instrument sales were falling.

Of course, there is also another reason - used to be that a record would give one an approximation of a live performance, and not a very realistic one at that. These days with digital reproduction and other advances in recording technologies, you can play the CD or an MP3 file which will sound exactly like the original artist. A live performer may add some spontaneity and maybe originality, but it is a lot easier and cheaper to play records or MP3s than to spend years learning to play music. My 6-year-old's favorite pastime is to turn on MIDI playback of my G1000 (which does sound excellent) and dance to it or sing along if he knows the words. When I try to teach him to play, he gets discouraged very quickly, because it is just so much easier to play prerecorded music than to learn how to play.

These are my $.02