Squeak,
The PSR550 is double the price of an EM20, so Roland did a really good job. Of course the PSR550 has all kinds of features like disk drive, importing custom styles, all kinds of handy buttons. The styles are better as well. On the Harmony-Central synth forum one poster said the Yamaha PSR piano sounded like thumb tacks falling on rusted guitar strings. That sounds about right. The piano sounds more like a guitar then a piano.

Hey Yamaha,
How about a "Sweet Piano" voice on your next PSR?
Starkeeper

Starkeeper,
Actually I used to have the PSR-540.. Yes the 540 and 550 are almost identical.. What I like about the 550 is that is looks way better, the screen gives you 3 options of backlight color which is nice because you can adjust it to the lighting your playing in.. My big gripe is the speaker system on both boards.. It ticks me off that Yamaha even bothers to put those tweeters on the keyboard.. They don't even work! Yamaha just put them there for show.... As far as the 550 actually sounding better that the 540, I'm not so sure.. Yamaha claims the 550 has more than twice the mb's of the 540.. If this was true the 550 would have more than 12 mbs.. The 540 was 6 megs. I honestly think the extra megs went to the extra sweet and cool voices.. Plus there are some different guitar sounds that I think used that extra memory, they are folk pick guitars that have the sound of the pick actually plucking the string.. There are 3 of these guitars and they all slighty differ in sound... I agree that a "sweet" or "cool" piano would be a great addition.. One shouldn't have to combine several piano sounds to get a decent "grand" That's what I had to do..

Squeak

[This message has been edited by squeak_D (edited 10-23-2002).]

It has been a while since I tried a G1000. From what I remember, my first impression was that the OS was difficult to navigate, but I didn't spend enough time to know for sure. I liked the sounds pretty well though.

I recently demoed a VA76 and an EM55. It seemed to me that the VA76 was easier to understand at first crack than the G1000 had been, and I liked the voices and styles. It's hard to compare the sounds between the two because of the time span involved, but I can say that I liked both when I tried them. In contrast, the EM55 did not seem to have the same quality of sounds or styles. I tried it side by side with the VA76. The PSR550 that was next to both of them sounded a lot better to me than the EM55. Well, that was my impression, for what it may be worth.

Best regards,

AJ

[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 10-23-2002).]

The EM55 features 116 drum sets incl the V Drums.... question...does that 20mb versus 48mb come into play here too..regarding drum quality..??

Im sure that's the case regarding the drums too.. That memory is to all the sounds.. Wouldn't it be nice if Yamaha set aside a few megs of memory just for the drums alone.. Imagine if they did this on the PSR-2000, or any of their PSR line.. Having 8-16 megs to the regular sounds and say 3 - 4 megs to the drums... Boy that would make a world of difference.. Seriously think about it.. How much memory do you think goes into the Demos on the keyboard??? Who really uses those demos too? If they were smart they'd put the demo songs on floppy and let you load them into the sequencer, and use that extra memory for voices... My old Yamaha synth allowed this.. There were no internal demos on the keyboard.. If you wanted to hear a demo you loaded it off disk, but what was cool is that demo included the entire performance set used to record it.. It gave you all the voices and sounds that were sampled for it, and they weren't just cheesy preset sounds.. The performance set uncluded some killer vocal samples, loops, and other things. Future versions of the 9000 Pro would be a great canidate for this considering it has a sampler. You could then turn around and clear the song and play around with the performance set and make your own cool songs from it.... Jot this one down Yamaha, I think it makes sense.

Squeak

[This message has been edited by squeak_D (edited 10-24-2002).]

[This message has been edited by squeak_D (edited 10-24-2002).]