Actually, the S-900 and nearly all of the later model Yamaha keyboards have sliders. However, instead of the old mechanical sliders, they are electronic. The old sliders fit into a tiny track which was sealed with two thin strips of rubber, one on each side of the slider. The rubber strips were meant to prevent dust from entering the wire-wound potentiometer. After a few years, the rubber usually became dry and hardened, dust particles filtered into the inner workings, and eventually it had to be replaced. The new electronic sliders are very effecient, easy to use, have no moving parts other than the button and the buttons are hermitically sealed in a sterile environment.

Back to the camcorder mic. They were never intended for anything other than human speech. Their frequency response is pretty much mid range, lows are clipped, and highs sound tinny. And, they are called shotgun mics for a reason. They tend to only focus on a very narrow area, and they are highly directional. That's why newscasters love them. You don't pick up extraneous sounds outside the area where the mic is pointed, which is usually directly at a person's face during a news broadcast. And, the range of a shotgun mic is fairly short, often falling off as much as 50 percent in just 10 feet. When I worked for a local cable TV station several years ago we used shoulder mounted cameras that cost $40,000 or more, and they were fit with the best shotgun mics available at the time. If the reporter was more than 20 feet from the camera we had to hook up a hand-held mic for him or her to use because the shotgun couldn't pick up the voices. Nuff said!

Gary

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Travlin' Easy