I saw the pictures of the new Yamaha Tyros. It seemed to be too good to be a faked picture, but this could be a protoype of the real thing or some of the first made units of it. When it comes to appearance it is pretty likely it will look like that, but they might yet improve a lot of things inside it which in turn might change a few details in the hardware interface.

What the prictures proove I think is that Yamaha in fact will market a new version of the Tyros soon and that the Tyros keyboards have been pretty successful in sales. So this is good news for us, at least for me, because I enjoy the Tyros series extremely much! I think it's still the best available arranger out there. Mega voice was a revolution sound wise, however I don't think anyone will be satisfied enough with another version of Tyros with as hard to use Mega voices as the first version and I think Yamaha has realised that it is not inline with its easy and powerful interface and will be much too irritating to be found in the new version.So playable Mega voices is really likely to be found in the next Tyros.

It will be interesting to see what they do about the expandability problem that the first Yamaha Tyros had. In order to be inline with the rest of the market and to maximize the Tyros market they need to do something about the expandability. The hard drive might be built-in in the new version, simply because more functionality demands storage on a higher level than floppy disks, especially since it is expected to have network features. Further either a sampler or expander card functionality is likely to be found in it.

One more thing I think they should include in this version, that they touched a little in the first version, is surround mixes. They have the knowledge, now is the right time to introduce it to home keyboardists.

When it comes to keys I don't think they will introduce any non 61-key version of it yet, simply because it has MIDI functionality and is a keyboard arranger for a mass market.

If none of these features I mentioned, will be found in the Tyros 2, I think it will be a major dissapointment. The network support and improved Mega voices is what I find most likely in the upcoming version of the Tyros. That is two very obvious things they saved when the first version was made.

It will also be interesting to see what they do about the song recording problem. In the first version they separated the song recording by USB and built a simple recorder mostly for style recording. However, for some reason they built in an event editor as well, something that made the sequencer extremely unbalanced. That's why I think they might add a few more basic things in the sequencer, such as measure processing, overdubbing and a measure meter.

People at Yamaha is reading what we say about the Tyros here on Synthzone very much. Both Synthzone and Harmony Central is carefully watched when it comes to this subject because it is good and cheap feedback by the right persons.

[This message has been edited by YamahaAndy (edited 02-27-2005).]

[This message has been edited by YamahaAndy (edited 02-27-2005).]