Although I am a hardcore KORG owner I would have to pick two companies that are different in the hardware and software. Ketron has made the most strides with the real drums and guitar and reading from the hard drive super fast to achieve this, but they lack the technology that is available today because it was designed too many years back, the AUDYA should have at least 1 gig on the sampler,198 voice polyphony,unlimited space hard drive(like the PA800), touch screen and USB 3 for the basics. The other company that would also hold number one is Lionstracs because of it being open and having the correct hardware and software for the pro musician to make it their own but it lacks the out of the box pro styles that KETRON is good at from past experience. The hardware is tremendous with touch screen, big hard drive,big sample ram,lots of polyphony etc etc. now if Lionstracs were to put enough effort with the styles as they did with the hardware forget about it, a big winner would emerge, one final thought , the most important features at the top of my list, for me at this stage of my pro life, is weight and price of keyboard.

[This message has been edited by vangelis (edited 09-22-2010).]

Out of all of you who said liontracs....How many of you actually have a Media Station unit?

Speaking for myself, I would have to sell everything to come up with 4-5 grand to buy a new keyboard and what's the reason that you would buy a new keyboard every year or so? certainly if you can do your job with a PA50 or a PSR9000 or even a drum machine you think the restaurant owner cares? as long as you feel that you are doing your job and the current setup is more than enough? this thing with the I gotta have the latest and greatest must end some day although we know that it is a big ego booster and we gotta have our drug, every year if possible.

Seems that all companies have been concentrating on different parts of the arranger in the last few years..

Roland have been concentrating on creating cheaper good sounding arrangers.

Yamaha has been concentrating on top knotch solo voices

Ketron has been concentrating on creating top A styles.

Korg has been concentrating to add more controllabillity and tweakabillity


Needles to say that i'd love to have seen an arranger with all of these abbilities but the 4 big brothers in arranger land have not done that for me in the last 10 years ever since my PSR 9000/ GEM WX2 Combo.


Lionstracs is a good compromis that needs some/ a lot of tweaking when it comes straight out of the box but in the end the styles of Q-ranger can sound almost as good as an Audya. There will be even more controllabillity and tweakabillity as on Korg. IT has great solo sounds espescially with the right VST's installed, maybe not as easilly playable as Yamaha's SA2 sounds, but comming close. They are not cheap, but i think they offer a lot of buck for the money. While there is a lot of content created for Lionstracs my biggest worries are that styles programmed by semi-pro's like tastenpoint will never get the same level as styles programmed by Yamaha's and espescially Ketron's pros.

So for now my bet would be on Lionstracs. But somehow i hope that a new Korg arranger will bring us audio styles, Karma compatibillity, DNC2 sounds, even more controllabillty(free assignable knobs) and a special mode to operate VST's and Sequencers/programs on a remote computer.

If Korg can do this, they have a winner workstation replacing both M3 and PA2X pro.

I am not expecting anything TOTL arranger from Roland soon and Yamaha T4 and Ketron Audya have clearly missed my target...(tough both sound astonishing when compared to my PSR 9000).. they are not TOTL enough arranger.

If you wanna know innovation and a company at least 10 years ahead of it's time the only company was General Music, I still have a GEM WK8 and looking at that year that it came out, no other keyboard had the most features at the time, too bad it no longer exists even the Genesys is exceptional.

Aye, my WX2 was way ahead of the competition, thats where GEM started to make a name..

Sadly bad support and even worse marketing where the end of GEM...

Their Real piano's are still unmatched tough.. Their Drake technollogy was phenomenal.

Well I wasn't going to mention GEM, having worked for them, but since someone else brought it up... There were a good number of features that were born in the Generalmusic design labs that later found their way into other brands. It is a pity things went the way they did with GEM.

Bachus, regarding your mention of bad support, I agree with you in part. The people handling product support directly with the customers were exceptional; "I don't usually blow my own horn, but what the heck, nobody else is going to do it". When I handled product support for GEM in the U.S. there was no one at any other company that worked as hard and as many hours as I did to make sure that our customers were taken care of. And I know that my counterpart in Italy was the same way as were others around the world. Unfortunately, the support we got from the rest of the company was all but non-existent most of the time. It was very frustrating for us. (sorry to go off topic, but I didn't start it )

So to get back to the question at hand:
Liontracs and Wersi deserve mention since they are doing things differently than other brands. Although I'm not sure if I would call packaging current technologies into a single case revolutionary. Cool yes, but not really new features. Korg has it hands down as far as combining an extremely programmable synthesizer with a very functional arranger. As already mentioned, the chord sequencer from Roland was unique and a feature that would be great to see again. Yamaha wins hands down on marketing/brain-washing. I've never seen so many people so excited, who just recently ripped the plastic bag off of a new purchase only to quickly reach for their wallet to buy the replacement model. Every Year. It's crazy.

The fact is, all of the manufacturers have come up with unique ideas, some more than others. Personally I would say Generalmusic has had the most innovative features and ideas, i.e. internal hard drive, internal vocal processing and 4 part harmonizer, composite TV and S-video outputs for lyrics, Realtime Audio Synchro Styles (yes, live drums, guitar, vocal backings, etc. way back over 10 years ago), internal CD-R drive and audio recording directly to the internal hard drive, etc.

[This message has been edited by WDMcM (edited 09-22-2010).]