Hi Guys…Leezone here…

As you know i attended the clinic in Brooklyn.
Just got back from the hospital as Nedim almost choked me to death ;-)

Before talking about AUDYA, I’d like to say thanks to Ted & Mr.Sound Staff for the SPECTACULAR hospitality. Everyone was very friendly. I wasn’t expecting any food and much to my surprise there was LOTS of home cooking which I assume was prepared for us my the wives, friends, daughters which were also in attendance.

I came to find that Mr. Sound is THE ONLY place I know that carries just about ALL arrangers out there, except the AUDYA (for now that is). Mr. Sound is also an authorized repair center for all major brands of musical instruments.

You’d think I work for or am promoting Mr. Sound, but I am NOT. Just letting my fellow synthzone members aware of this as they may wanna try out all arrangers, or they may have equipment to repair and know of no place to take it… I know someone here had an issue with Mr.Sound via telephone BUT i have nothing but good memories, and good times, and i think many others did too.

Setup:
Oh the sound system that was setup was AWESOME, 2 Dynacords towers. Man those are some good speakers….. Oh , and we also had the AUDYA hooked up to a computer monitor, so we saw what the Screen looked like (mirror of AUDYA’s screen)

So onto the AUDYA… (these are my opinions so of course there are positives and negatives)

Like AJ said, it started out as a question and answer… which I think was good to learn about , and learn how AUDYA works. After many, many questions AJ started to talk about the AUDYA… All in all AJ did a good job in answering questions and demoing, as he was still there when I left at 7pm.
Basically he demonstrated the AI, where AUDYA improvises when you, the player, plays same things over and over, or when you hit keys harder, etc. The AUDYA varies its accompaniments, or adds some quick fills, extra notes here and there, or a different bass line, which I think keeps things sounding fresh and live.

AJ then showed off some of the styles, sounds, etc…
I’ll briefly start out talking about the styles.

Styles:
I can honestly say that the styles do sound very good. Very much IN YOUR FACE, Live. To me the BEST part of the AUDYA’s styles have to be the Drums. They are very, very realistic. The snare is KILLER. Deep full kick drum. Also the cymbals make this keyboard sound so real. Real cymbals played by real drummers. No matter how well you can program you will never get close to the realism of these “audio cymbals”.
The basses are nice too.
The AUDYA does have live audio bass on many styles. The audio guitar loops sound AMAZING as well.
As far as complex chords, as I’ve mentioned, 6, 7, 9, 11 chords are played via audio (basic chord), and the 6, 7, 9, 11 notes are played by midi guitar.
Aug, Sus, Dim,,, there is some dropout of audio loop which Is picked up by midi guitars, but again that depends on the style chosen. I would love for Ketron to expand on the guitar chord library. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty damn good.

To finish off talking about styles... The Modern Dance Styles need some work. I think it would be worthwhile to get some YOUNG people to program the Dance/Techno/House, type stuff. Then this AUDYA would also start to attract the "younger" generation. Also important for these Dance Styles to come to life are synth sounds which i will discuss in a bit.

The one important thing I will say about styles is that many people will want or have to create their own, especially those playing ethnic music, Portuguese, Turkish, Jewish music. That’s great, BUT, one problem. Ketron does not have the software to create your own styles. Or a software to convert midi files to styles (like Styleworks).
Styles can be created via Cubase, Logic, Sonar etc. but it’s a bit more complicated as you’ll have to set up your tracks, engage record, fly in realtime to AUDYA, hit Pattern A, then B, etc. Ketron owners REALLY need to have software to facilitate style creation. Without it, I feel many will shy away from the keyboard as not everyone is fluent is a DAW program or has the time and energy for this. So Ketron get to work on software.
AJ please let us know if we will ever have such software or if something is in the works.

Cool thing about AUDYA is that it has 6 ea. 1/4" outs with tip-ring-sleeve, so using the correct cables gets you 12 mono outs that can go straight to a mixer, so you can record whatever you want independently to lets say Pro Tools, or you can have your sound man control EVERY instrument independently.

One thing I wish the AUDYA had was mute buttons under sliders for the style parts. You cannot mute a part of style at this time (as you would by pressing volume up and down buttons at same time on other Ketrons). AJ did mention that future OS will let you mute via the side “F1”, “F2” buttons, so we’ll see ..

Vocalizer: Did not impress me. Sounded a bit robotic for my taste. I’m not saying it sucks. I’m saying that I would NOT use it and wish it wasn’t there as it would have brought price down a bit ;-) But others may love it, who knows… Reverbs are just ok, so I will continue to use my Lexicon.

Onto the Sounds:
Well to be honest, they did not impress me a whole lot . It’s got all the bread and butter sounds as do the old Ketron products. Are the sounds better in AUDYA? Yes they are, but to me they are quite similar. Just a whole lot of what we are already used to. I was really hoping for some cutting-edge sounds. There are lots of synth type sounds, but unfortunately are not comparable to Yamaha’s, Korg’s, Rolands. These synth sounds would REALLY make the dance styles shine, which unfortunately do not at this time. That’s’ just my opinion. Some sounds sound a bit “thin”. This being said, the user would want to create their own sounds by layering. For instance I felt brass was just Ok, not awesome. But as you can layer 4 sounds, I believe, I would create my own “thick” brass sound as I did on my Roland G-70.
In my opinion the best sounds in AUDYA are drums of course, Hammond, piano, accordions, flutes, saxes, trumpet. I don’t care much for the new Nylon. The distortion guitar was not impressive either. I think Ketron has got to study Yamaha’s guitar algorithms :-)
If I get the AUDYA I definitely will be using a laptop with VST’s for right hand sounds to complement the bread and butter sounds.

Memory Issues:
The one thing that was discussed was the miniscule 64MB of Ram. I think this is an issue which Ketron has to explain a bit better. I will attempt to explain this a bit…
From what AJ said and from what I understood, the AUDYA compresses your samples, or what’s loaded to keyboard. It compresses it NOT by degrading the sound as does an mp3, but rather it kind of .ZIPs it, but with a Ketron proprietary compressing program. I believe it compresses somewhere near 12x or maybe more. So lets say you want to load samples which total 62MB (which normally would fill up AUDYA’s entire RAM),,,, In reality AUDYA would compress the 62MB to let’s say about 5MB. So in reality what we think is 64MB of RAM is actually about 768MB. (assuming compression of 12x)
AJ or anyone, PLEASE do correct me if I’m wrong. But that’s how I understood it, and that’s how I can best explain it. I do not want to assume or put out false info on this so please do correct me if I’m wrong.
It just seems that IF this is how AUDYA handles the memory, Ketron should really think about HAMMERING this into our brains and making everyone aware of this. Promote this Compression feature… You can say something like it has 64MB but compression gives you the equivalent of roughly xxx MB
AJ, please do explain this a bit further as I am a bit uncertain how it works…

Build Quality:
The keybed feels pretty good, not as good as my G-70. The buttons, sliders look a bit “cheap” to me. Again, I guess I am so spoiled with my G-70 sliders and buttons. I really wish the Ketron’s build was more like the Roland Fantom G, but I guess you can’t have everything. If it had “better” components then we probably would have to dish out $7,000.

Price:
As far as price of AUDYA, as I’ve said in a previous post, AJ seems to be guestimating it in the $5,000’ish range which I still feel is TOO MUCH. IF and ONLY IF this thing looked and felt like a Fantom, would it be worth $5,000. One thing is for sure, It would sell MUCH better if it was $4,000.
Do I think it’s worth $5k, NO. Will I still buy it ?
Well I do LOVE that “live” feel this keyboard brings. I'll have to see how many gigs I have this year, how much old gear I can sell, and IF Ketron will give us that MUCH needed software :-)

In a nutshell, what I loved:
the Drums, the LIVE “in your face” sound, Live Audio Bass and Electric Guitar loops, the styles in general, flexibility in sound routing, bread and butter sounds.

what I disliked:
overall build, lack of software to program styles, lack of modern sounds (synth, techno'ish), all guitar sounds (steel, nylon, distortion), vocalizer, THE PRICE

here's to hoping that Ketron will continue to improve on this ground-breaking arranger.
It's got the potential, but it still needs work.

hope you guys enjoyed the review...let's hear your thoughts

be well everyone...

Leezone (the other Lee)

Lee thanx for your honest review .....I hope to hear more from others as these Arranger fiesta sessions progress around the country and updates to the OS & issues discussed by you are improved hopefully down the road...we'll see...

What I can say is that when I tried the Audya and loaded samples, they occupied their actual size in RAM, i.e. loading the stereo grand occupied around 36MB of ram (the size of the file).

Thanks lee for your review, I guess when Mr Sound gets one in or Frank, I'll give it a whirl. Did you hear or try any of the tangos or foxtrots?

mrdave,

i am unsure as to exactly how this whole compression thing works, how it's used,
whether it's compressed to hard drive and then expanded to RAM, which would be useless, SO...

perhaps AJ can explain it in more detail...

Hard Drive/USB ------> Compressed [12:1] ------> Audya RAM.

So files (when loaded) are "zipped" into RAM. When reading from RAM to Sound card ----> Unzipped for processing/use. Display shows actual file size though.

Hope this helps.

AJ

PS: Leezone - good explanation. I figured someone else would be better off explaining so more understand, than me!

[This message has been edited by Ketron_AJ (edited 02-24-2009).]

Leezone, can you go into more detail regarding SMF playback?

Specifically search functions to try and find a specific song?
Also, I read that the Audya has it's own Crossfade feature like the Korg PA series. Did you try that at all, and if so, how was it?

So yuo're telling me that the 36MB Stereo piano instrument when loaded into RAM will take only 3MB? PLEASE.. don't be fool... this is somewhat not possible for at least 2 reasons:
1) Lossless audio compression at 12:1 is pratically impossible, you can achieve 12:1 ratio with lossy compression algorithms like MP3 but you'll have a noticeable loss of quality in sound at these high ratios.
2) If this would be the case I could load many supersolo sounds on audya's RAM, instead when loading big files (like the stereo piano) I can barely load 2 or 3 of them before getting out of memory. I tried this on the Audya I had for experiments, so I know what I say...
Note that I tried os ver 1.0, but I don't think they added this "compression" to 1.1.
Do you want to prove it? Simple: make a video where you load the following 3 sounds together:
SUPERSOLO/STEREO_GRAND.INS
SUPERSOLO/POP_ALTO.INS
SUPERSOLO/POP_TENOR.INS
These together are around 96MB in size, if they would be compressed at 12:1 they would take 8MB and could be loaded together.

AJ said above that they are zipping the files. Which means you will likely fit about 70MB of data into the 64MB chip.

Regards.
James.

[This message has been edited by Irishacts (edited 02-25-2009).]

The word "zipped" was in quotes... there is a compression scheme called flac that looslesly (sic) compresses audio files (cd ripped audio etc) at about 1/2 their original size, but consumes a lot of processing power. You probably know it better than me.

12:1 ratio? Well, let's see it.

Onthe other hand, a "simple" waveform, such as a sax or piano would be more "compression friendly" than a full, complex song, right?

[This message has been edited by trident (edited 02-25-2009).]