I read somewhere that the Yamaha EX series had been discontinued (since January 2000).
Does somebody know if this is true?

If yes, is there a replacement model?

Thanks

Carlos

In Australia, the music shops were selling off the last few of these units for $1,995.00 (they did retail at $4,995.00).

It's a pity that the EX5 couldn't hit the mark they way something such as the Korg Trinity did because in many ways it is way more powerful than that synthe (I own a Triton and compared both this and the EX5 before opting for the former).

The EX5 sounded (and still does sound!) FANTASTIC! It has a powerful sample based synthe architecture and it's got the added VL and AN synthe sections to boot. It's a pity that Yamaha couldn't design the instrument to use is DSP resources much more efficiently when in performance mode (how stupid that nearly all your insert effect go when selecting an AN, VL or FDSP voice????). Plus the fact that this instruments midi timing left alot to be desired didn't help it's cause either.

I must say, that it wasn't the most intuitive unit to get around either and who wants to wait bloody 30 minutes for 64MB of samples to load via SCSI???????? WHAT?

If Yamaha added a way better sampler, better SCSI implementation, got rid of the midi timing problem and allowed it's DSP resources to be used 'more sensibly', this synthe would have become the synthe of the 90's just like the DX7, D50 and M1 were the synthes of the 80's.

No doubt Yamaha will bring out a workstation based instrument based around the new S series of synthes and adding a sequencer and hopefully sampling facilites (to compete with the Korg Triton no doubt). I am just assuming this will happen- I haven't heard anything! Cheers.