Since drums do not have to respond to chord changes,it is easier to sync audio drums to the pattern.

Ketron did this ( audio drums) and now Yamaha & Korg are following imo. However there are not many styles on the T5 that have the audio tracks.

rosetree,
Yes I like the M3 exp sounds very much. I had a PA2XPRO and many sounds suffered from poor sampling/programming.
Example...you play a nice Sax solo, and some notes now & then have a honk sound instead of the same sound as the others...and sometimes vibrato varies so much note-note that it sounds horrible. OK for fast stuff...NFG for nice orchestral or music with nice slower melody's with feeling. If they are going to do the sampling with vibrato...the speed & depth need to be similar.

The thing is...talking Pianos or any thing...these high end company's know how to do terrific sounds...and they have them ...they sometimes only use older samples or are afraid to put in their best sounds into an arranger because the PRO division does not want the arrangers to sound as good (fighting among the divisions). I do think that has gotten better in recent years...and sharing seems to be better.

I agree, the styles sound good, sure, but they are only audio drums and they dont come close to the audya full audio style technollogy...

I think yamaha opted for the cheap way out when they implemented audio styles this way.

Either they went the "cheap way" or they were being very cautious in fully implementing audio based styles.

Korg has completely shied away from using this technology, as has Roland, although the latter appears to be less involved with arrangers lately, so perhaps Yamaha is just putting their toe in the water before taking the plunge.

Even Ketron hasn't got it perfected yet, being that they need to use midi based sounds to reproduce certain complex chords, although, I must admit, they have done a pretty good job disguising that fact.

As I said before, I'm quite content with my Tyros4's entirely midi based styles, especially since the editing (most important to me) and storage is without issues, and the use of mega voices (and SA/SA2 voices) still gives an extremely realistic representation.

Ian

True, all of the above. And nobody ever came up and said a piano was too bright or muddy or thinned out in the higher octaves. If what you play is within the context of the song, the crowd really don't care too much one way or the other. At least, that's been my experience over the years.

Ol' Jerry Lee never worried about this stuff. Back then you were stuck with whatever happened to be in the hall. And we've all had some doozies, i'll bet.

Now THAT was authenticity.

Yes, obviously there is a considerably split in sample quality between different Korg instruments (maybe arrangers versus high-end synthesizers) and also between presets versus expansions. Those M3 expansions were taken from the OASYS, which had a 7,000€ price tag... In these spheres, it is also insiginificant whether a sample is from 2014 or from 2005, even a sample from the late 1990s can be superior if it was produced thoroughly and with enough megabytes of data.
As you say, there is a problem if vibrato is sampled and there are not enough samples per octave. The vibrato speed varies terribly then. On the other hand, no artificial (edited) LFO vibrato can get as realistic as a sampled one. I hate edited vibrato, you immediately hear that it is not from a real instrument. So one would have to have samples for every single key, and obviously Korg didn't want to spend that much waveROM for saxophones in the PA2X.

Funnily, in the case of Yamaha it is partly vice versa: a lot of the Tyros voices are not part of the pro synthesizer Motif: it doesn't have SA2 voices. But as I said, on the other hand, the Tyros doesn't have the higher-quality pianos the Motif can load into its flash board.

I wish I could get a MOXF sound module with all those expansion sounds you have.
A regular motif module would not have them would it?

No, unfortunately the last rack/module Yamaha released was the Motif XS rack. It doesn't have RAM or flash memory for samples, you cannot load any new samples.
Some hoped for a new Motif XF rack with free sample memory after Roland released the Integra, but nothing happened... I would also swap my MoXF with a module, as you can be more flexible with the choice of the keyboard you use.

I agree with you Ian. With Audya, Ketron bit off more then they could chew and relied on OS upgrades to fix the bugs. Had they refreshed the SD1, Ketron may have had more success.

And where does their marketing & support come into the picture regarding their success thru the years.?