Does a Strativarius have a digital out? If not, they really screwed up. How could they expect someone to go into the studio with one and capture the true violin sounds with an antiquated fiddle that has no digital out? I'm keeping my $3 million dollars - at least until the next version comes out!

Beakybird

Sorry, MarcK, I don't understand your point about a low end A/D converter at all, and loss of quality from it?

The whole point of digital out is that there is no analogue stage whatsoever until you actually play the music through some loudspeakers. This will either be through the D/A in your soundcard, or more likely the D/A in your audio CD player, after you have made a CD, and many audio CD players have higher quality converters generally speaking than most soundcards (excepting some high end soundcards).

There is no A/D involved at all in the keyboard - that is the whole point of digital out - not having to convert to analogue and then back to digital again and then back to analogue again, with all the potential additive degradation that involves.

IMO,
Millions of records were made without digital that sound perfectly great. I would not dispute that digital is cleaner, however the average listener would not notice the difference at all. One has to ask themselves, who are they recording for, the average listener or a recording expert to judge. To me it is not night and day. It's more like late evening to night.

I think sometimes now with all this new and improved technology, we get way overly invloved in tweeking and perfection. Somewhere in all that, I think the music gets lost and the pure joy of making it and putting out a very acceptable cut.
jam on,
Terry

well if the average listener can't hear the difference he can save himself an awful lot of money both on keyboards and playback equipment
Once you have experienced all digital chains you certainly would not want to go back to analogue connections.

I think it doesn't matter whether you can convert a to d and vice versa, or get a great converter that'll do the job...

The point is that the high end arranger from one company MUST have what's a MUST in 21st century. It is not up to them to decide whether we need it or not. If they ask that much $$$ for it then they have to include a mandatory technology in their top product. You can get their top workstation (Motif 88) for less than $2000 and it has all this: Expandable via three slots for Modular Synthesis Plug-in boards, one slot for mLAN8E or AIEB, and two slots for 72-pin SIMMs. External memory provided by SmartMedia® card or SCSI to ZIP, to HD, or CD-ROM (option). Controls include pitch-bend wheel, modulation wheel, master volume slider, assignable control slider, assignable knob, A/D input gain, and rotary encoder. Connections include Left/mono, Right 1/4" jacks, L/R assignable 1/4" output, two foot controller inputs, one foot switch input, one sustain pedal input, MIDI in/out/thru, A/D inputs (L/R, mic, line, stereo 1/4" jack), one breath controller input, stereo headphone output (1/4" jack), a SCSI connection, USB (MIDI 3 port), and optical (TOS-Link) digital out.

You know what comes into my mind? Yes, yes and yes: to Yamaha and all the world arrangers ARE NOT professional and not for pro studio recordings. That's why they don't bother to put all that stuff, but ask about $3000 for the arranger keyboard.

Shame.

NYer: I fully agree... the Motif is fully dressed digitally. Also, the Motif was the first instrument that Yamaha released it's new OPT panels for voice editing to use with Sonar. They still haven't done that even for the 9000Pro. Heck, they haven't even released a generic XG voice editing OPT panel. Seems like a Motif and a QY700 combo might be more of a modern-technology-arranger than anything Yamaha is making in their arranger line.

Then again... a tiny footnote on Page 3 of the Tools for Tyros manual says that the Tyros Voice Editor and the File Utility programs are stand-alone applications OR OPT applications. That means you can open these programs from within a sequencer like Cakewalk Sonar 2.0. I assume that would also mean that the Tyros voice editor has or is also a Cakewalk instrument definition file. Funny the things you discover in the fine print...

WHY IN THE WORLD THEY COULDN'T MAKE MOTIF AS AN ARRANGER?

For those who wouldn't want that - just turn accomp. OFF.

It's that easy.

technicsplayer, you're probably right. The digital out would bypass any analog conversion (assuming they build it that way, which is not a given).

Why didn't they make the Motif an arranger? There are probably many reasons, here are two that come to mind:
Price would be prohibitive for many people.
"Professional Workstation" image of Motif would likely be tarnished (to those people who consider arrangers to be "unprofessional").

If it doesnt sound better, and have better features than the Motif, then buy the Motif. Digital out is not necessary for 99.9% of arranger customers, including me, and probably you. Why would we want to pay for it. If Yamaha can't get $3,000 for Tyros, so what, it's destined to flop. A digital out would make no difference to most of us so if I was Yamaha, I wouldn't be worrying too much about digital outputs. I'll wait til I play it to judge.

Midnite