Audya comments from Shreveport

I thought it would be a good idea to have the Audya comments on a new thread.

Here was Don's comment:

AJ arrived with the Audya about 5:30. He did a short demo that quickly turned into two hours. He will also have it there for us tomorrow at noon before having to catch a plane.
I think most everyone was impressed by the Audya. What interested me most was the wonderful real-time control the player has. Many assignable sliders and buttons, several inter-active features, three intros and endings plus fills and three BREAKS per style. The list of real-time features is really long and I've only touched on a few, but one was that the bass and style parts seem to "learn" what you are playing and add variety to what they did, based upon your playing pattern. Hard to explain, but great to hear.
The sound was next to incredible. You would think a live band was performing for you.
For Dikki, I had AJ play every type of chord he knew and the arranger played them flawlessly. He also told me that the audio styles were user programmable, but it takes a lot of work because they are quite complex.
There are 360 factory styles, and I think he said 85 percent of them use audio. The ones that didn't still sounded really good. It's hard to explain, but they seem to have really done the homework on this thing.
Of course it took about three years, so it SHOULD be right
The vocal harmonizer sounded great, and there are real-time sliders for both the lead vocal and harmony parts. I'm sure he will get deeper into the harmonizer features tomorrow. There are two XLR inputs, each with input level controls.
There are four audio outs PLUS two stereo outs, plus Aux outs and aux ins.
I haven't heard another arranger piano sound as good as this one.
I wasn't crazy about the location of the style controls--in the middle--but AJ said they had to put them there in order to not compromise the size and length of the sliders, which are on the left, where I wish the style controls were. The pb and mod wheels are above the left hand, as they were on SD1 I think. Workable, but not ideal to me.
Halfway through the demo, I got up and put a for sale sign on my E50. But it's not for sale as I think it's the best low-price arranger on the market as far as my needs go.
Even after I get the Audya, I will keep it as back up, probably.
If there are specific questions you have for AJ, I'll try to get them answered tomorrow.
As for me, I'll most likely have to have one pretty soon.
DonM

Donny DNJ's comment

The Audya really sounded great last night here at the jam....AJ really went into detatil in his Demo to try to explain all the great features......& also show us what you can achive with this new KB.Plus I recieved a new Ketron T Shirt YIPPPEEE!
More to come for sure......this may be the only KB you ever need

Well, I am back from the Jam and as usual the food was great and the hosts awesome. AJ arrived with the Audya and did an hour seminar after which he was kind enough to indulge those of us who wanted to get a "hands on" experiece with the keyboard.

AJ indicated there will be a good users manual and a tutorial that helps the player get the most out of the keyboard. We will see.

The Jam went well while I was there - only about 8 hours. I was really pre-occupied with my daughters situation and packed up and returned home after the Jam session ended.

There are pictures of the Audya and the Jam at the PSR Tutorial site. The link is below.
Enjoy.
http://www.psrtutorial.com/ForumMain.html

Hammer


http://www.psrtutorial.com/ForumMain.html

[QUOTE]Originally posted by hammer:
[B]Well, I am back from the Jam and as usual the food was great and the hosts awesome. AJ arrived with the Audya and did an hour seminar after which he was kind enough to indulge those of us who wanted to get a "hands on" experiece with the keyboard.

AJ indicated there will be a good users manual and a tutorial that helps the player get the most out of the keyboard. We will see.

The Jam went well while I was there - only about 8 hours. I was really pre-occupied with my daughters situation and packed up and returned home after the Jam session ended.

There are pictures of the Audya and the Jam at the PSR Tutorial site. The link is below.
Enjoy.
http://www.psrtutorial.com/ForumMain.html

Go to the yamaha general catagory and the Jam thread.

Hammer


[

Can't find the picture file...

I see the postings where you say they are, but don't see anything to DL them...

???

------------------
Bill in Dayton

Tom,
they are in a zip file at the bottom of the posts. There are several posts with pictures.
Hammer

It appears you have to be a member in order to see the zip files. I can only see the text as well on that forum.

You must be a member to download files, including photo files. There's no charge, and it's an outstanding forum.

Cheers,
Gary

It's a great forum if you are into Yamaha Gary

I learned more at the PSR site in 3 weeks than I could have in 3 months if I had to read the manual Great group of folks there as well.

Hammer thanks for the photos!

Sorry Tom, don't mean to take away from the title of the post.


[This message has been edited by Stephenm52 (edited 01-19-2009).]

What was the Keybed like?

Fully/Semi/Non Weighted???

Please let us know....

hellboy,
the keys are longer than most arranger keys - close to a piano key size. The feel was firm but not stiff - more like my Korg PA1X than than the lighter touch Tyros 3 keys.

Hammer

Tom:

Thanks so much for the review of the new Audya. Man, I wish I could have been there to see and here that thing... and meet A.J.

Glad to hear that it was the rousing success I suspected it would be. Mason does a great job at everything he tackles... like switching keyboards (to another brand) at the drop of a hat... and continuing to sing and play as if he'd been working those keys in that specific model for years.

Oh well, maybe next year.

Dave Rice

Well that sounds good to me Hammer, I REALLY like the feel of my PA-1X Keybed.

Funnily enough though, I've been secretly contemplating getting a second Keyboard - fully weighted - just for Piano parts.
I'm not formally trained, but (even) my fingers just FLY on a fully weighted Piano style keybed, to the point where I feel I'm willing to lug around a fully weighted Stage Piano....or something, to get that wonderful feeling.

As good as a quality, semi-weighted keybed can be, it's really just a halfway house when it comes to real piano playing...

(IMO)

We spent more than two more hours with the Audya today. I'm sold.
It's not perfect, but it's way ahead of anything else I've played or heard, in both features and sound.
Yesterday I mentioned in has two stereo outs and four aux outs. Actually, the two stereo outs can each be split, using a stereo cable, and EIGHT individual parts can be routed to separate outputs. This means you could send to eight individual tracks of a recorder at once for studio work.
It comes with an 80-gig hard drive standard, upgradeable to 500 gigs now. They hope to make it capable of handling a terrabyte in the future.
The styles that use audio loops are fantastic BUT the styles carried over from older machines sound great too, much better than they did in previous models, because they are using the sound engine from the
Audya. Also, you can easily add your choice of audio arpeggio loops to these styles. You can select and add a loop to a style globally, or add a separate loop to each variation.
The versatility of this machine is almost beyond my comprehension, yet it is quite intuitive. It's so easy to change things, edit things, customize things and quickly save them to Registration.
AJ loaded several samples that were on the hard drive, and it took just a matter of a few seconds to load five sounds. There is a new sampled piano sound that is really huge, yet it took only about five or six seconds to load. All the others loaded really quickly.
The keys are semi-weighted and very responsive.
I'm really tired. DNJ is wearing me out.
More tomorrow.
DonM

So you are sold...

At what price?

Diki,

I asked AJ about price and he believes it will come in close to what the Tyros 3 costs at retail. However, he did say he could not guarantee any price at this point. He also said it should be available in Feb of 2009 in the US.

Hammer

Hi all,
This sounds great and I can't wait to try an Audya out myself.
I have a question for you who have seen and tried the Audya.
I have been trying to get in touch with Ketron Italy, but so far no reply from them.
As a blind musician I have tried out many keyboards including Yamaha Tyros 3, Korg Pa2X and the Roland E80.
But this could maybe be the keyboard that I have been looking for since I also prefer 76 keys.
Are there many buttons on the instrument for many functions? On the Tyros 3 it requires you to go into menus and select different things and to start the harddisk recording its not just press of one or two buttons.
Maybe this is the wrong topic to ask this kind of question, but I thought I do it since there are people who have tried the Audya reading this.
Any info would be apreciated, many thanks!

Christian-1,
I suggest you pose your question directly to AJ. He lurks around on this forum so perhaps he could provide you with personal - via email - answers to your question. I hesitate to jump in here not knowing exactly what are your needs.

Good luck,
Hammer

The Audya has more dedicated buttons than any keyboard I've seen. And many of them are assignable. They are arranged in blocks, a block of buttons for styles, one for sounds, one for recording, etc.
Once you get it set up, it should be a great keyboard for a blind musician.
DonM

Hello Don,
Many thanks for the explanation.
Well, I've sent Ketron another email here since I had some issues reading the manual in PDF-format I want to know how easy it is to use the harddisc recording feature.
I really look forward of trying out the Audya myself.
Christian

Christian_1,

AUDYA has 116 buttons (6 assignable), 1 data/value wheel, 17 slidders (1-4 assignable), and 1 LED contrast button. These are also comfortably well raised so you can 'feel' your way across. During the design, we also gathered some input from some blind musicians in Phiadelphia and Virginia ...

AJ

AJ,
That is great news that you considered those aspects for blind musicians!

I know that a touch screen is not so good for our seeing impaired friends. And I heard that is one reason Yamaha does not use it.

I hope it works out well for you Christian_1

Lee

Hello AJ,
That sounds great!
If you want, feel free to send me an email privately since I have a few more questions.
But could you please tell me how easy it is to use the harddisc recorder and do the menus that are being used contains end points?
Many thanks,
Christian

Christian_1

Please explain what you mean by 'End points'.

Also (for a future release), we might also have a feature where AUDYA will 'beep' to you (either through speakers or just your headphones) when you press a button on the panel to confirm you've pressed a button. This could be expanded so AUDYA 'reads' the current page to you so you always know what page/screen you are in.

For now, we're still working away at releasing the keyboard first globally.

Thanks,

AJ

Hello again AJ,
I must say that this is very nice to hear!
Me and others have been trying to make other keyboard manufactures understand that we also want to use their instruments but none of them doesn't seem to be interested in making some accessibility adjustments.
When scrolling up and down a menu the menu might go back to the top when you reach the bottom of the menu and the good thing would be if you can press the down arrow several times and you know for sure that you are actually at the bottom of a menu if you know a function is there, do you understand what I mean?
So the beeps or eventually the speech output, could that be a software upgrade?
Once again, nice to hear this!

I guess nobody thought to ask AJ if the Audya indeed has USB 2.0 huh? Not that he would actually answer and divulge such super secret information though eh?

All the best,
Mike

The speech output would be a software upgrade - tying menus to various mp3 files played when the selected menu/screen is displayed. However, this is for 'down-the-road'.

As for scrolling through menus with an end point rather than a loop - you have a good point there.

Thanks,

AJ