Quote:
Originally posted by spalding:
Diki i dont know about you but i buy a keyboard to play not to sound edit. If i wanted to sound edit i would buy an out and out synth!!! That does not mean that i wont tweak sounds or if i have the time really dig into the keyboard but NOONE SHOULD BUY A KEYBOARD THAT THEY HAVE TO TWEAK JUST FOR THE SOUND TO BE ACCEPTABLE ! Thats complete madness and if thats what your into i have a casio here that i will sell to you for £1000 that you can tweeak to your hearts desire. Maybe you can make it sound better than the £300 keyboard that it was new !!

Worse still , noone should by a £3500 keyboard that sounds like my £300 casio !!!

I cannot ever remember hearing anyone make so many complaints about a keybooards general sound.

George tested the G70 and he said it was fine. I respect his opinion on the unit he had. I have tested the instrunmemt myself on two separate occasions and i wont mince my words , it sounded rubbish. But that was the unit i had tried. It had nothing to do with sound preference, i like korg, yams and rolands. This was a crap product full stop. Dont tell me that i should be spending hours of my time messing about with £000's of hitech junk to make it sound good!


Dead right. The first true arranger I owned was a Korg i3 - bought for portability to replace the last of a series of enormous Yamaha Electone organs (which I liked a lot). The Korg sounded great straight out of the box, and the more you delved into it, the more impressed you became.

I now have a VA-76. It sounded crap when I first heard it, as did all it's VA relatives. After three years of "fine tuning" the thing, it sounds better - now just "poor" as opposed to "crap".

That is not to say that it wasn't the right choice - it has certain functionality that I particularly wanted - but no matter what you do, it ultimately sounds like a £500 keyboard rather than one that costs over 4 times that price.

A good example is the drum sounds. The old Korg only had 8 kits - but they were 8 good kits - each with a choice of 4 snare drums and 4 bass drums which you could freely swap out. In contrast, the Roland boasts 128 kits, none of which ever seems to be quite what you are looking for. With the Korg, I coud always find a kit with a snare and bass-drum combination that sounded just right for whatever song I was arranging. With the Roland I seem to spend hours trying to get the drums to sound anything other than gutless and mushy - usually giving up and accepting somthing that I am not really satisfied with.

Whilst I accept that different makers have their own characteristic sound - and that is a good thing - the fundamental difference I am describing here is that the old Korg sounded like a "pro" instrument straight out of the box, while the Roland VA sounds "1980s home organ" no matter what you do to it.

In summary, I think that Spalding is dead right. To be worth buying, any instrument needs to sound good straight out of the box, but then to be capable of being tweaked to suit personal tastes and different styles of music. Just how good, and how versatile, will depend on the price you pay - but I would rather have a simple instrument that sounds "right" than one which can do everything, but does it all badly.......