After reading many posts about Yamaha's most recent keyboards, I find myself asking.. "are we being too hard on Yamaha?" Granted many of the complaints regarding the PSR-2000 were more than justified, but are users asking a bit much? I'm not trying to jump on any toes, but maybe we ask a little too much in some areas. Yamaha like all other makers cheese out on build quality to add more features and to keep cost down to both them and the consumer. Aside from some of the bugs and so forth, they really pack a lot into these keyboards for the price. Yamaha in no way ever intended for the PSR-2000 to be in the professional market. It's just below their pro line, so of course some corners are going to be cut, but for $1,199.00 it's a great deal as far as sound quality and features. I look at my Yamaha PSR-550 and I have to hand it to Yamaha. I only paid $460.00 for that keyboard and for that price it kicks ass! I can't think of ANY other keyboard that even comes close to the 550 in terms of sound quality and features. It is still the best in its class. The PSR-2000 is the same way. It's the only board that offers that much for the price...... I could understand if the 2000 was marketed as a professional keyboard and built like it is now. Then I too would say "clean it up Yamaha", but it's not in the pro category (even though it has the features and performs in that category). The keyboard world has and most likely always will consider keyboards with speakers to be 2nd class even if they are better than a lot of pro synths. That's been the opinion for years. Only recently have pro arrangers been featured in keyboard magazines with good reviews. Heck, even the Casio MZ-2000 graced the cover of a magazine and turned heads. It's nothing new that Yamaha makes buggy keyboards... Some of their past models were nightmares, but I think they have made a huge improvment..... If I offended anyone I apologize.. Just my opinion on the matter...

Squeak

I agree that Yamaha have been getting a rough ride here, but to a degree it's their own fault!

The PSR2000 - warts and all - is a great deal for the money, no question, but as I recall the factor that really raised the temperature was the withdrawal of the flash OS feature - and heres the rub - without telling anybody or updating the web pages to reflect the change other than (belatedly) just deleting the reference to flash OS.

The presence (and publicising) of flash OS was a significant lever towards purchasing the keyboard on the grounds that any teething problems cause by software would be easy to fix, and future updates easy to install. If I'd bought an early 2000 on the premise that it has a flash OS, only to discover that it hadn't, and therefore upgrade would involve a repair shop, then I'd be pretty ****ed off!

So Yahama have effectively placed themselves at the top of the "kick 'em" list.

I would agree that large amounts of the flak aimed at Yamaha applies equally to other manufacturers.

I try to have equal ammounts of praise and critique in my posts, but lately .... the critique had had the lion's share. It's not our fault that so many things are wrong with the 2000. Sure - there are a lot of things that are RIGHT too, but simply stated - it is not the keyboard that was advertised, and does NOT do what the manual SAYS it should. This is why so many of us are mad. No one ever expected it to be the best out there, but I sure did expect it to do what it SAID it could. Registration memory is a feature that has been perfected for YEARS - why is it so incomplete in this new model?
(just one point of worry .... there are many more)

"are we being too hard on Yamaha?"
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In a way. They make very reliable motorcycles. Mine is from 1981 and all works great.




[This message has been edited by mbl (edited 04-29-2002).]

To me, the 2000 is a very nice and advanced home keyboard, with a lot of pro features to boot, but I have to agree with those who believe that Yamaha didn't make it with the pro players ( or studios ) in mind. I don't think it would hold up well against the rigors of either of the latter uses.

I concur totally with Uncle Dave, Macallock, and DonM on their thoughts concerning the way in which the 2000 was marketed by Yamaha as opposed to how it was actually released. The OS in mine ( and apparently some others) was just a mess, and while that itself was bad it would have been tolerable to some degree had an update been available via disk ( flash rom ) as promised by yamaha. That it wasn't available as promised really pushed me over the edge with the board. It didn't help that my board sat in a repair center for weeks while I waited for an upgrade that months later still hasn't come. ( Or has it finally ? )

I gave Korg nearly as much flak over the PA80 in the early going because they released it with such an incomplete, and somewhat useless OS. I was a day or two away from trading it in when 2.0 came out and was made available for download right from Korg's website. 2.0 didn't fix everything, but it was a major step in the right direction. Korg let us know that another upgrade was coming later ( and it did finally ). They have been far from perfect too, but I would asy that their after market support of the PA80 is far better than what Yamaha has offered us for the 2000 series to date.

I notice that there is no lack of support, upgrades, or input in general from Yamaha on its' sites for the Motif, while their arranger customers in comparison wait around for tiny scraps of help for a board that obviously has some problems, at least for some of the users. I think they DO treat the arranger customers with a lot less regard than their "pro" synth customers. Maybe that isn't entirely true, but Yamaha has done nothing to sway me from thinking that way. Keyboard "snobbery" aside, a customer is a customer, and I think Yamaha could do a lot better to serve all of us with the same regard.

AJ



[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 04-29-2002).]