I agree with you. 64 MB is far too less.. I guess a cup of nescafe and a slice of cake costs more than the cost of 64 MB memory
64 MB USB Drive

May be the samples are compressed very well to enable a lot of stuff inside that 64MB without compromising quality. I know that the Roland`s have very good compression without compromising much on the quality Eg: G-70 has excellent sounds.. more than 1300 in their 192 MB of Waverom. But then again, it would be nice to have atleast 2 Expansion Packs/ atleast 512 MB of user sampling in the MOTL; the S650 allows one ExpansionPack so the 950 should allow 1.5 Expansion Packs

But overall, the audio stuff i.e. both styles and controls of pitch and tempo are cool features
If Bert Smorenburg does the demos for arrangers.. then surely, this will sound like top of the line

Comment Removed by me

Our disappointments. No sa2 voices, no choir
Sounds, cluttered button layout, same screen,
Only 100 new sounds, still no live drum kits,
It seems to me that there was a a large increase
In sounds and screen quality from s900 to s910

Dunno, Donny... you ever played at home for relatives and friends? Feel like sitting around like a doofus for several minutes while you try to explain you stopped playing because you needed to load a different audio pack in?

Personally, I think Yamaha have goofed rushing out such an important change of direction (from MIDI drums to audio ones) in such a half-hearted and incomplete manner. This technology needed to be introduced on the TOTL, backed by an arranger FULL of theses audio styles, sufficient memory to load them all in, fast enough memory to load more in on the gig, and make their money on the rush to buy the T5.

THEN they could let it trickle down to the PSR's, along with enough of them to satisfy rather than tease, and a memory system proven to WORK.

For the want of a nail...

I agree with almost everything stated by everybody. Be that as it may, considering the improvements from my S900 to the S910, and now these new improvements with the S950, it's a no-brainer for me.
As soon as I can drop a few of my very hard to come by sheckles on this new yamaha, it's a done deal!

I think that, for me, it is sad that Yamaha have chosen this route. I can only imagine how good a Yamaha PSR could sound if the money spent on R&D'ing this feature were simply spent on creating (or even simply porting from the XF series) far better, punchier MIDI drum kits.

It is the path taken by most other manufacturers, to great success. Going the all audio route seems such a convoluted fix for a simple problem. And, as with any audio loop drum track, you lose many advantages that MIDI styles give you. You can't change the drumkit... a sticks style will never change into brushes, or a rock kit into a funk kit. Your style will never sound different with some simply editing.

And the drum patterns will never be editable... If you have a song where moving the backbeat around in one bar of the groove, or a slightly different kick pattern helps fit a song better, you are all out of luck.

I've been saying this since the Ketron days, but personally for me, I thinks audio loops are a technological dead end, with more disadvantages than advantages and improvements. Instead of this dead end, if arranger manufacturers simply made better, more detailed and punchy drum KITS, all of our current editing options still work. Current Korg and Roland arrangers have drum patterns that can sound quite close to real audio loops. And, if you listen to the demos of the better VSTi drum kits (BFD, EZDrummer, etc.) you can see a MIDI drumkit can be made to sound completely indistinguishable.

As ROM sizes gradually ramp up, more memory devoted to better drum kits will bring us virtually everything that features like Yamaha's audio styles give us, with NONE of the disadvantages.

That's a win/win, in my book.

The Audya live drums are between 28mb and 35mb each and currently it has 347 completely seperate audiodrum loops available. (more on the way)

So you might just squeeze 2 audya sized drum loops onto the PSR950. My feeling it will be more like the SD5 (which also uses audio drums) and the Wersi Wing but neither keyboard anything like the Audya's quality.

The 64mb expansion slot is good for one thing: Yamaha Expansion Packs sold at their website. At least for the PSR-S650 these expansion packs are exclusively for ethnic music. You get ethnic voices that don't come with the original keyboard + styles that take advantage of these voices.

And how much more is the Audya compared to the S950?