Tony,
I hope not to have hurt you with what I said about the Genesys; I am sure that my needs are completely different from yours. Just to make an example, I don't sing and so harmonizers are to me nothing else than a waste of space inside a keyboard; I know that GEM keyboards have very good sequencers, but unfortunately I do not use sequencers at all, because I record my tracks directly into a program like Cool Edit Pro as .wav tracks. Finally, I am not a professional musician so I cannot buy a keyboard and deduct it from my income (too bad...) and so have to be careful to buy keyboards that will keep more than others their value over time. All this is to say that my priorities are different from yours and that's fine; you have to admit that I didn't go raving about the Tyros because I think that I pointed out its shortcomings too, and in fact I didn't buy one!
Since this Forum is a place to exchange opinions and stay informed and since nobody here works for Yamaha, GEM, Roland or Ketron, I think that we all can point out what goes or doesn't go in a keyboard and this should also encourage manufactures, who seem to monitor this Forum, to improve their products.
I agree that you know the Genesys much better than I do and so am ready to listen to any demo you can record with it or, if you simply make a list of all the sounds you like most, I promise that I will go back to the store and listen to them all. On the other hand, if you say that I have to tweak them to get the best results, then I agree with Terry: a keyboard should sound great right out of the box, otherwise what are sound engineers paid for?
Friendly,
Andrea

Ziggy,

I believe that Dreamer point is the following: If he is buying a new keyboard to replace all what he has, then the Genesys would be a strong contender especially if they can do something about the Piano sound (I have not heard it by the way).

But Since he already has some very good quality keyboards and sound modules, he does not see in Genesys the justification to pay thousands of dollars to get that new keyboard. Notice that the impression that he got about Genesys is that it is closer to SD1 which he already owns. That is nothing against Genesys.

I think that the real criticsm was against Tyros because he does not have a yamaha keyboard and an addition of yamaha keyboard will complement his collection. However, he was not impressed enough with Tyros to add it.

Guys you did not get my point. I am not a sort of fanatic person about keyboards, I use it to earn mony and because I love doing it.I have nothing about what ANDREA said in fact I am glad he went and heard what's new in the market. My point was that in a few hours you can't judge a keyboard, and here we are talking about the top of the range keyboards. that is all I wanted to say, and because he was talking about a keyboard I already own so I think I can tell you all better about that keyboard, I haven't heard the Yamaha , I have heard the demos like all of you, and they sound great, so you don't think I have something against Yamaha.
But. Terry it seems you too got me wrong, because the way you wrote you sure did get me wrong or I didn't explained myself well enough.
ANDREA I asked you if you heard the MIDI Songs because there you will see what you can make out with that keyboard, and if you ever by that shop pop in and ask him to listen to the songs that came with Genesys and then you will know why I told you so.
More than this I cannot add. Subject is closed on my behalf.

Tony

It is not possible to say a piano sounds
better than another one. If you do not like
a pianosound than this is strictly personal.
Did you ever think about the fact that there
many factories that make accoustical piano's
and they all sound different, even two of one
factory are not the same. The factories make
cheep and very expensive ones, they sound
very different from eachother.
A very good sampled sound from a very cheep
piano does not better than the original.
At the same time we can say that a bad sample
taken from a very expensive Steinway is a
Steinway sample but how it sounds....?

Question for Dreamer or maybe one of the current Genesys owners could help out...When trying out the acoustic pianos on the Genesys, do you remember which piano voices you listened to? Were they the Family-Presets or single voices?

Here's a cut and paste from the owners manual.

...each sound preset has been professionally created to offer the correct effects and other settings for the sound it contains. You can think of the sound presets as a kind of "showcase" of the best sounds that the Genesys has to offer.

Now this refers to the Family-Presets and in the Piano Family there is StereoGrand and RealPiano (and others). Did you listen to either one of these?

Or did you select single mode and pick individual piano sounds digging down into the 16 banks of single sounds (8 sounds per bank)?

I'm curious as to which single sounds were used for the Family-Preset StereoGrand or RealPiano. Was it Piano1 (1-1-1) or did they use a piano voice (or voices) found in a different bank (some folks say the good stuff can be found in the deeper banks)?

mike

Mike,
I listened to the Stereo Grand.

Mart,

Don't you think some sampled pianos are more realistic than others? It seems that, while acoustic pianos vary in sound, most sample-playback pianos do not do a good job of emulating any acoustic piano over its dynamic range.

[This message has been edited by Clif Anderson (edited 10-24-2002).]

I agree with Ziggy about the Genesys and have also spent 2 days on a Tyros at my local shop.
I own a SD1, Genesys, Roland G1000 and Kurzweil K2600. There is no such thing as a best keyboard and there never will be as people just have different tastes and requirements. All keyboards have their good and bad points. To me the Tyros sounded weak in all departments and as for that piano being good, I'm not going into that. If the price was lower then it would offer better value, but I still wouldn't buy one.
I was very dissapointed with the Genesys for the first 2 weeks as there were operating problems, but Gem have sorted these out in an update. I don't use midi files but as Ziggy said, they do sound great.
I'll stick with my SD1 and Genesys for live use as they are the easiest keyboards I've worked with in ages and I've gone through loads over the years. The built in CDRW saves me time having to work with my PC or Mac as I can record straight away.

Question to Ziggy:

Can you control the volume that comes from the speaker separately from the volume that comes from the main stereo outs?

sk800, If you are asking me about the output left+right that feed to a PA system the answear is this. No you don't have a left and right chanel slider. but you can PAN the sounds in real time, now that you asked me that question, on the same subject I tell you that you have another 2 extra output so you can root say the Drums from out1 and say the base from out2 to feed into another PA system so in all you have 4 outputs coming out of the Keyboard. one other thing nobody seems to mention about the Genesys that it has a 32 channel SEQUENCER and guys that helps no need for program changes.