Feature:
The single best features of this keyboard for me: the great sound quality, the xclnt on-board speakers, it's relatively light weight, ability to be battery powered, and relative ease to program. i do wish there were more and better ways to save "registrations" (combination sounds), and that there were tutorials for getting up to speed on all the features
Quality:
So far so good- have had about 4 months, no problem, bring it 1-2 x's a week to jam sessions.
Value:
Am still surprised to get this satisfying of a keyboard for this kind of money
Desirability:
i've been telling a lot of people about this board, 'cause with its surprisingly good and satisfying sound, and with the auto accompaniment feature you can use it to practice your scales and get up to speed with the various programmed rhythms. They obviously used pro musicians to create the backing tracks.
Sound:
Totally blown away- i've owned quite a few keyboards, and to my amazement the piano sound on this board is the best i've heard, in fact many of the basic soundz are just outstanding. It really helps that the onboard speakers are quite decent and create a wonderful stereo sound just on their own, but plug this guy in and you'll be surprised at what a big sound it has. Tip: there's an overall eq setting that can be saved with the sound- this helps a lot, otherwise it's easy to get too bassy.
Overall:
Seeing how good this keyboard is at the under 400 bucks price point has made me want more- basically with this keyboard i give up a lot that more expensive pro boards have, like aftertouch, like a real sequencer, like an assignable foot pedal controller, like higher polyphony (only 32 notes here), more and better fx, better modulation wheel choices, better control means like ribbon controllers, etc. etc.
But surprisingly i still absolutely love this board, get more satisfaction than i have from any of the other 8-9 other boards i've had, and would only trade up if the board it replaced had such great sounds and (hopefully) built-in speakers.
i've felt self-conscious going into the home enthusiast range of boards, but i figured out some time ago that i don't want to be a programmer, and so many of the synths out there require waaay too much patience and left brain skills.
and if you've never played a keyboard that has built-in speakers you might be in for a surprise- esp. the bass vibrates the whole board, so you get that tactile, and the speakers are right in your face, so even if you're getting your main sound from external speakers, the on-board speakers function as a set of built-in monitors.
all i'm waitin' for now is for the manufacturers to get the idea of the portable party board: having a keyboard like this that accepted external sound sources and had a small on-board mixer would mean you could show up anywhere, even the beach, and play/sing along to songs on your ipod
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