oh for goodness sake lee !! Noone is saying it is EXACTLY like an arranger !!! How many times does that have to be said ?????

It could not replace a fully featured arranger in its current form.But it does have arranger features, drum fills, styles of increasing and decreasing complecity that follow chord progressions as you have just seen. Is that clear enough ??? Or did you not see that ???? I almost think that blindness is catching ha ha :-) (i am just kidding with you Leeboy , dont be offended)

I dont know how old you are or how long you are intending to live but i gaurantee you that fully featured arranger functions or their equivalent will appear on workstations in my life time and the profit driven separation between arranger keyboards and workstation will disappear. In fact there is a song book feature on th XF but it is not desribed in those terms it...oh never mind !!!

You are right though , it was not a great presentation. Not quite sure if yamaha are willing to let the lucrative arranger market die just yet. But that market will die eventually . There are only so many times that the current owners of yamaha arrangers will be prepared to buy the mext arranger model that contains 90% of the same features as the last arranger model. That can be said for their workstations too as the XF is a minor incremental advance on the XS. However workstation owners are continually coming into the market as more young people tend to buy them and upgrade as new models come out.

I suspect (dont know for certain) that the arranger market is a shrinking one as us more mature buyers get older and not enough younger ones come into the market to replace us and purchase new arrangers. For example ,the demise of top arrangers from manufacturers such as roland ,Gem,kawai,casio and quite possibly in the future ketron.

Dont look for a lot of updates for your audya , it took Ketron nearly 4 years to complete the Audya from the time they anounced it. They will need to sell more and bring out new models in the future to make profit. Free updates dont make good business sense to a small company like Ketron.

But thats another topic.

Thanks for engaging in the discussion.


[This message has been edited by spalding1968 (edited 09-10-2010).]

[This message has been edited by spalding1968 (edited 09-10-2010).]