Well, I think you have to make a difference between cell-phone manufacturers, who sell in unit numbers tens of thousands of times greater than the keyboard market. Innovation has to be payed for, but we want technically more advanced products at prices way LESS than their predecessors, and we want it NOW

We are, sad to say, a TINY, TINY market. What did I hear one time? That the ENTIRE keyboard market worldwide has about the same yearly gross as ONE Walmart..!

The problem, as I see it, is that we often waste valuable time criticizing arrangers for non-current peripherals that WORK. Just because an arranger uses an older PCMCIA slot, and you need to put Compact Flash cards in them to work, rather than the latest SDHD cards, as long as it WORKS (and the cards are still available... which they are), what does it matter? If your arranger ONLY has USB1, but it has no significant need for USB2, except to save you a few seconds off of doing the same function with USB1, what does it matter?

I can see that there ARE many things that could be improved on Yamaha's, and to be honest, those improvements exist on other manufacturer arrangers. If they are THAT important to you, go buy something else But bottom line is, we don't buy arrangers for the peripherals, we buy them for the SOUND, and for the STYLES. Everything else is secondary.

Were this a multi-billion dollar industry like the cell phone industry (and unit prices were in the low hundreds of dollars, not several thousands), you WOULD see a technology turnover at their pace. But when we are a tiny, tiny market, you can't expect that pace of change, realistically...

Diki, you make great points.

However, it would cost less than a dollar per unit to increase the flash memory from 1mb to 100mb.

Some of the changes I am talking about wouldn't cost anything but a little bit of programming time, like to make some buttons, otherwise useless in a menu, activate some necessary functions. Don't you think that if you're doing a live performance with reverb on your voice that it is necessary to be able to get the reverb off to talk to the audience? Why should I have to go into a submenu?

The PSR3000 had an excellent direct access system where you could press Direct Access and then buttons on the board and get into all types of submenus. They made the system on the PSR-S900 inferior so that there is no direct way to get into many submenus.

Yamaha could make money marketing special multi footswitch devices for their keyboards for those of us who want more than two (see past threads on the Midi Solutions footswitch controller for how you can get at least one extra footswitch).

I think that Diki makes a good point though as far as implementing other improvements, that there isn't enough demand for these keyboards. They're essentially specialty devices and the prices are kind of inflated compared to mass market devices.

Beakybird

I think ..folks here are missing a point...The low to mid priced keyboards being mentioned..are.."home keyboards"..the typical owner doesn't need any of the improvements you are asking for..The very few that actually use the mentioned keyboards as "income" tools...are not representative of Yamaha's PSR line..customers....Fact is , either is the Tyros3 model..It is widely a "home user" keyboard...I think you will find the 76 model top of the line Korg, Roland, and Ketron models to be more considered in the "income producing " users...

I think you underestimate the cost of adding the extra flash memory, Beaky. It's not just the cost of adding the raw component itself, but the cost of redesigning the main board in it's entirety... it's the cost of redesigning the chips, logic board and a host of other things. There's a reason why Yamaha can keep trotting out quite improved arrangers at little more than the cost of the previous models... It is because they are using essentially the SAME hardware architecture, and the majority of the improvements are due to upgraded sounds and OS features.

But once you start to add in hardware components that are main board related (unlike, say, a better display, a separate component), you vastly increase the cost of production. No the flash memory itself is cheap, but the cost of incorporating it into a new design is the TRUE cost.

I thought they would need a new chip when they add voice rom, so I wouldn't think that adding flash rom would be a big deal. I mean they have two years to do it.

I think Yamaha's been using the same a/c adapter since the PSR740 (10+ years) and the same speakers since the PSR2000 (8 years). They can spring for something new once in a while.

With the S900 they took away hardware: They removed the Smart Media storage and they took away RCA outputs. They also made the Direct Access aspect of their OS vastly inferior. With the PSR3000, I used to be able to get into a lot of different submenus on the fly when I was playing. I can't do that anymore.

I think Yamaha added a couple of buttons on the PSR-S900.

Most of the time when a manufacturer offers a new product they do have major hardware improvements. The cell phones aren't any more expensive and they have much more memory and better cameras and mp3 players. The cameras are going down in price, and they have more pixels and can bluetooth to your computer and printer. Laptops are getting more and more powerful for the same price.

It is rather surprising for a product to come out after a two + year hiatus and for it to have essentially the same hardware except for a screen - and then to charge more for it (and don't forget that they raised the price for the S900 by $200 or so several months ago).

Oh well, someone connected to Yamaha on the yamahapkowner forum mentioned that there would be unexpected goodies, so we will see what those are.

I'm excited about the new voices. I'll probably use the mp3 player. It would be nice to be excited about other things as well. I would have rather waited another year to get real revamp.

As I have competitors in the senior circuit here in Chicago that have the T3, however, I'm going to pick up the S910 so I'm not blown in the dust.

Beakybird

Hi guys - I gather from the voices discussion that S910 will not likely play the new T3 styles any better than the T2 can. With so many of the voices set for SA2 sounds in the T3 styles, it appears S910 owners will have to revoice a large majority of the sounds and then tweak them to deal with the velocity and other voice nuances that will not match up with normal SA sounds.

Anybody have any additional insight into this situation?
Or does anyone know if Yamaha has included the T3 voices and done the tweaking to make them sound good on S910?

Hope you all have a great weekend!!

Randy

Guys - OOPS - in my post regarding whether Yammie would include the T3 'voices', I meant "anyone think they may include the T3 styles and tweak them for S910 sounds"...

Tried editing the post, but my Blackberry won't let me get to the "edit" icon.....

Randy

At least for the regular S.A. voices, they are not used in styles, only for accompaniment. The two reasons the T3 styles don't sound good in the S910 are 1) that they have a lot of other voices, Mega! Voices and many of the Sweet!, Cool!, and Live! voices that are not in the PSR-S910, and 2) the T3 has New Guitar Enhance Style File Format (GE-SFF) which improves auto-accomp Styles.

The PSR-S910 will have the Guitar Enhance Style File Format, something which the T2 didn't have. The question is whether this was one of the reasons that many of the T3 styles don't load properly on the T2. Is the T2 or S900 equipped to play these style files?

The S910 will have a lot of voices that the S900 didn't have, so many of the T3 styles will probably load into the S910, but I am betting that there will be many T3 styles that take advantage of the close to 100 Mega!, Sweet!, Cool!, and Live! voices that the PSR-S910 doesn't have.

I don't think that Yamaha will make these styles available for the PSR-S910, but I bet that there will be some industrious people among us who will convert them.

Beakybird

[This message has been edited by Beakybird (edited 07-30-2009).]

I think there is software available to revoice the T3 styles for older instruments.
Pretty sure Michael Bedesen wrote it. Check on PSR Tutorial.
I could be wrong. (I've been married three times.}
DonM

I didn't see that at the svpworld website. Also I didn't realize that the software at svpworld.com is different fromt the software at http://www.jososoft.dk/yamaha/. It looks like you can find the software to convert styles from newer keyboards to older keyboards at Sorensen's website at http://www.jososoft.dk/yamaha/software/sremix/index.htm. I'll have to play around with it sometime.

Beakybird

[This message has been edited by Beakybird (edited 07-31-2009).]