Hey, has anyone tried the Piano expansion card that Yamaha makes? Worth the money? I have a Yamaha 9000 Pro and I'm not crazy about the stock Live!Grand piano sound... it falls off too quickly for my taste on the high end and playing it at low velocity simply rolls some high frequencies off the sound. Strangely, the piano expansion card is the only one that Yamaha does not have mp3 samples of on it's websites. I onder why...

I have the plg card in my 9kpro and like it, tho must admit I don't use it as much as I'd expected. there are lots of diff acoustic piano sounds and splits, tho some may give you the same drop-off problem you detect on the Live! sample. there are several solid, if unexceptional, rhodes sounds -- these are far less inspiring than the ones in the motif/triton etc. and not enuf clavs!

YES!!! I tolerated the internal Live!Grand piano sound on the Yamaha 9000Pro for almost a week, then I finally broke down and bought the PLG150-PF Piano Expansion card, which had gotten some very good reviews. Best move yet. The card donates all of it's 16MB to piano samples and the difference is very tangible. Not only are the piano sounds much warmer and realistic compared to the stock 9000 piano sounds, especially in the high end where the stock 9000's sound were shrill, but it added another 64 note of polyphony to the stock 124 of the 9000 for a whopping total 190-note polyphony... which isn't as ridiculous as it sound because I was easily able to eat 124 by playing piano/strings over accompanyment. I have another expansion card that adds another five-note polyphony dedicated synth also (the PLG150-AN, which is kinda like having an old Prophet 5 handy). But that's way secondary to my bread-and-butter piano sound, which is now better, fuller, the note-robbing has stopped, and it gives back the full polyphony of the keyboard to layers, accompanyment and midi file playback. I am at last totally pleased with the 9000 Pro. I wasn't sure I was gonna be for my entire first week of ownership. What a difference.

It must take a pianist to appreciate the subtle differences between the internal 9000 Pro piano sounds and the expansion card because the previous owner owned another Yamaha synth with the PLG150-PF installed and he said he could tell much of a difference between it and the 9000's pianos. Also, Electronic Musican did a review on the 9000 Pro and the reviewer loved the 9000's piano sounds. But for me, there is no comparison. The fall-off on the high end is still a little brief to me but that's being too picky... the sound is there and I would take this into any studio now. Now a sequencer upgrade will be necessary to convert all of my sequences to XG... looks like Sonar time.

Happy happy, joy joy...

Esh http://www.mp3.com/esh