The G70 is readily available in the UK. The price certainly is high but follows the pattern of other manufacturers when marketing a new model. This high price allows dealers to give a high price for the part exchange and here I give an example.
I put my Yamaha PSR9000 PRO complete with hard drive and VM card in for part exchange.
The best deal I got was my KB plus £1075 and free delivery. The asking price for the G70 is £2300 currently in the UK.
I did the deal and so far I'm reasonably happy with learning the steep learning curve, but having said that, I hasten to add that my last five keyboards have all been Yamaha and I change about every 12 months.
A few things I dislike about the G70 are, lack of hold or freeze globally with transpose, key touch and the house bricks they put in to make it heavier ! The drum breaks in the style changes appear strange and appear to loose the tempo (but don't obviously), The One Touch / Transpose / Tone effects should be to the right of the screen for ease of use and, the screen wants a more acute angle to see it better. I have to lean forward to get the brightest view even with the contrast control set to best position.
I use the PK5 pedal set and I cannot find any reference to it in the manaul.
They include a CD and I would have thought that some reference should have been made for this too.
There's no doubt about it, Roland's principal competitor Yamaha do a much better job for their customers in replying to the questions asked.
I have put six questions to The Roland's Keyboard Club site and never had a reply back. THIS IS NOT GOOD.
If I ring Yamaha in the UK, I'm immediately put through to the techi department, they take my query and ring me back within the hour. THAT'S SERVICE ROLAND....so get with it !
Where Roland's concerned I've always had the same sort of service and I go back to the days when I plays the D50, D70 the XP etc. Even with the G800 the service was quite poor and this was why I moved over to Yamaha.
On the G800 I have a series of broken buttons whereby they would collapse and stay down, I eventually travelled to Rolands base and collected a dozen or so switch tops. I eventually got fed up with stripping the KB down to fit them.
I'll stick with the G70 for the time being knowing that I could sell it privately for the price of a new Tyros !!!
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Derek Miles