Ketron has lowered or dropped the price of the SD5 also including a 40 gig hard drive, vocalizer, and 2 gig pattern expansion memory until the end of July.

Also the first 50 will receive bonus styles and midi files.

If anyone is interested give me a call

Frank
Audioworks
(888) 374-6076

I might get one for myself

Sorry left out the important info

$2,599.99 MAP

If Ketron is listening, they add a whole shtload of midi and controll feautures to the Audya OS...



I really doubt if any of these musical instrument makers really listens to the potentiall customers instead of listening to their wallets.

The time of stradivarius whome made instruments with love and dedication has been long passed away..

The only one carefully listening to the possible customer base is lionstracs, but they still have a long way to go untill their product is where they want it to be. (thye are on a very tight budget.)

The price of listening and doing EVERYTHING the various users want is an arranger no-one can afford...

Not everyone has bottomless pockets, Bachus, and few companies can stay afloat by making five figure ($) arrangers that a mere handful can buy. That's what killed the organ market, but it looks like arranger makers have more sense than that.

Why haven't you got a Scala, yet? That ought to do the trick

I disagree Dikki...

Processors are so powerfull these days that its very good possible when you do it all software based....

And the price of the hardware can be reasonably low since you can juts use the top of the line intel Quad cores with lots of cheep mem and a huge 500 GB hard disk..

Only thing really expensive will be the touch screen.

You don't even have to write all the software, there is so many good things available under GNU...

But the most important thing is to get the sofware stable.... get a very easy to understand interface on top, and make the menu structure under it very deep.

And about the Scala... The abacus with 2 keyboards would do just fine for me... but its way to expensive...so there is some truth in your words... But Wersi is a very small company with not a lot of sales....Yamaha or Korg would have much less development costs/unit and could deliver the same quallity as wersi at a much cheeper price.

Also Lionstracs seems to be somming along with their development... THeir new Q-ranger software is almost done now...all they need is musicians to make those awesome user styles that a great keyboard needs. if i have 5000 good sounding instruments... then i also want atleast 1000 good sounding styles to come with the keyboard.

[This message has been edited by Bachus (edited 05-27-2008).]

bachus, you're right about going software.
i am preety sure this will be the way that also the big guys will take sooner or later. can not be otherwise.
i would say not this next generation, but the following, will present some interesting software-based solutions from Roland, Yamaha, Korg...
probably it will take another good 5-10 years though...

Totally agree.
Porting the embedded CPU firmware to PC X86 is not possible right now.
For example is like if you want porting the windows Vista to MAC OS or Linux or the all reverse combination, all are not compatible at all.
ALL is possible under software BUT mean to rewrite the all code again for each platform.

This what it mean?
IF Yamaha, Roland, Korg...like to Jump to the X86 CPU, they have to put in the trash 20 years of embedded firmware developement.
Find a totally new software developer Team for the new OS and restart all again to rewrite the code for the PC X86 system and debug it...
You have to wait min another 5 years...
For sure they will continue resell the same soup for another 5-10 years, don't worry.

About also the new musical technology on software...
Are always the small company that offer the new technology, because the big company will never risk to investing in one new product IF they are NOT sure 100% that can be resell of milions of pcs.
They just waiting that the small company open the way and when the hard work is made, they are ready to copy...

So...why they need 50/100 software developers if then your keyboard still not can make the firmware for manage the ghost hardware slider or introducing in the keyboard one Mp3 player?

the probe is here: http://www.celemony.com/cms/
ONE guy alone made this application that NO another BIG company in the world was able just to thinking...
this guy can be really OUR teacher...

Well, Bachus, you have certainly inadvertantly answered the question about whether arranger players are musicians or not; and also whether all those years of training and practice are really necessary for an aspiring young musician. To the latter, I guess the answer is NO, let some other dumb slob with talent and training do it for you.

"not that there's anything wrong with that".......Jerry Seinfeld.

chas