Hi, I am a home keyboardist, and I could compare Tyros and Pa3X last week here in Madrid. I Put here some impressions.
Korg keybed seemed much better, and touch screen was very comfortable and intuitive. Beside it, the tyros screen seemed outdated, but bigger and very clear.
Voices are good, but Tyros has better acoustical sounds (SA voices). Piano sound is imho better in Pa3x (and its better keybed helps in that opinion), but flutes, sax, etc. are better in tyros.
About styles, I really liked Korg styles, longer and richer than Tyros. Fills (now 4 fills) are more varied than tyros too. Multi Pads are very good. Unplugged styles are very beutiful ones.
A disapointmet for the Korg was about loading external styles. Tyros read styles directly from the flash drive, and so you may have thousands of styles ready to be used directly. But not is the same in Pa3x: external styles are usually grouped into sets (in Tyros styles are independent, not sets) and they must be loaded first on the keyboard. I seems to me a worse system, especially if you want to listen to many styles. It seems to me Roland does something similar (but not sets): styles must be first loaded into the keyboard and then they may be liestened or used (it was one of bad points of bk7m). Why Korg has not improved that???
About price, Tyros is 3500 €, Pa3x 61-keys is 3200 € (but has no internal hard drive nor video interface, Tyros has both). Pa3x 76-keys costs 3400 € : it has hard disk but no video interface, but it has 76 keys!! All these prices are without speakers.
Thanks for your review. The Roland E50, G70, E80 and BK-7m all will play styles directly from external media. They do not have to be loaded.
With the E series there is a dedicated folder in which the styles are placed on the external drive. After that you can access them directly and search for them in several different ways. They all remain in the same folder however.
The BK-7m can just play them directly from the thumb drive and you can make as many folders as you need.
I would like to audition a PA3X sometime to see if it would fit my needs. It certainly has a lot of features I like, but the main criteria are ease of operation, sound quality and availability of styles.
I won't be in the market this year, so by the time I get around to seeing one any small bugs that may exist will probably have been corrected.
The key touch or feel is very subjective. I actually prefer the extremely light touch usually present in the cheaper arrangers such as E50 and PSR series, etc. I'm sure players that previously played piano want just the opposite. I think the Tyros 4 strikes a happy medium.
I didn't like the operating system much on my previous Korgs. I really like the Audya OS and Roland OS. However I am fluent in Yamaha as well and it is fine with many shortcuts via direct access.
I miss having multi-pads, and I may change controllers so I can regain this function on the BK-7m. The new Roland controller has assignable pads. It will be a limited version, but better than having none. This feature is missing on all the Roland keyboards. I have always used them almost exclusively for finger drum hits and rolls, and sometimes some guitar riffs or strums.
As to the touch screen, my old fat fingers are not ideally suited for one, but if it is large enough I can deal with it.
I think I prefer buttons in most cases.
It's nice to have several great choices.
DonM
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