Some comments on the expansion board thing. Beakybird wrote, “The PSR 9000 Pro takes expansion cards that expand wave rom and allow for such things as emulation of wind instrument sounds and killer organ sounds.” Then sk880user replied, “I hate expansion cards. how about you make everything already installed and built in for the same price. That is a point against PSR9kpro.”

Beakybird, the Yamaha system of expansion boards, now called MSPS (Multiple Synthesis Plugin System) and formerly called PLG (the individual cards still use model names beginning with PLG) is much, much more than just expanded wave ROM. Other digital instrument manufacturers (Roland, Korg, etc.) may be satisfied with using whole expansion cards to do work that a simple memory stick could do, but not Yamaha. While many of their cards do indeed include more wave ROM (most notably the PLG-XG and PLG-PF cards), not one of the cards is only wave ROM. All of them also add at least an additional effects engine, and all but the PLG-VH card also add actual sound generation engines. Even for the XG and PF cards, where the sound engines are just plain old AWM2 wavetable playback, that still means additional notes of polyphony dedicated to the new voices, leaving the 126 or whatever the 9000pro has still free for all of its own on-board sounds!

Sk880user, you miss the whole point of expansion cards, especially when done the Yamaha way: namely, cards can come out later to add features that did not exist when the unit was originally designed! Without expansion cards, to get such new features, you would need at least an outboard MIDI tone generator unit with the sounds or technology you want, and may even have to completely move up to a whole new keyboard! The first device that could take Yamaha PLG cards was the MU100R rack-mount Level 4 XG tone generator, and it did come with its two PLG slots already filled: one VL card, one VH card. Those were the only two cards that existed then! Since then, new cards have been made that were created long after the MU100R was designed, and yet not one of them is incompatible with the MU100R (though you would, of course, have to remove one of the two included cards to make room for it)! Saying that expansion cards are a bad idea for keyboards is like saying that expansion cards are a bad idea for PCs, and that PCs should already come with every possible function that you might ever want! (Note that every personal computer that ever tried that idea didn’t last long in the market unless and until they moved to the realm of expandability: one of the major selling points of the original 1984 Apple Macintosh with 128k of RAM was that it had everything built-in and would never need expansion! Now look at the current Mac G4s with their USB and FireWire ports on the back [the latter of which, by the way, are compatible with Yamaha’s new open mLAN standard, a vastly improved musical connection system: one mLAN cable is equivalent to upwards of 100 audio cables and up to 256 bi-directional MIDI cables — in any combination!], and as if that weren’t enough, they have PCI and AGP slots as well! Other examples of personal computers that never wised up in this regard, or did so too late, and so are no longer with us, include the Atari ST and the Timex Sinclair, etc.) Even if Yamaha put every PLG feature that exists now into the 9000pro, what about others that might be invented later (case in point: a card that added the synthesis power of the FS [Formant Shaping] series of synthesizers, that expands greatly on the older FM technology used in the current DX card — if Yamaha doesn’t release such a card within a year or two, I will be very disappointed in them!)? Without slots, there would be no way to add them!

On the other hand, why have to pay for still more features that you might never want to use? If Yamaha had added all the powers of the DX and AN cards, but you only play music from before the onset of rock, those features would be pretty much wasted on you. Yet you would be paying for them anyway. This applies to the PC world as well: if you don’t need a four-figure professional OpenGL 3D card, why pay for one? But if you do need one, buy it and plug it in!