A seminar was held today for the local dealers of Technics products in NE Ohio, and I had an up close and very personal introduction to the KN7000. First off, you will be blown away when you here this thing! The sounds ar CD quality crystal clear! The new speaker compliment is wonderful. If you look again close at the pictures we've been seeing, there is what appears to be a black bar above the keys when the lid is opened. This is actually more speakers - RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU AS YOU PLAY, besides the two on the left, and two on the right, AND the bass port in the back.

The lid is very solid and not at all what I thought it would be like. My opinion was it would be somewhat flimsy, but it's very sturdy AND on some kind of friction type closure that prohibits the lid from slamming donw shut. You have to push it down to close it. In other words, if you push it down half way it stays there till you push it all the way closed. AND the screen tilts back and forth independently from the lid. The reason the lid has the kind of resistance is so that players of different heights can put it back all the way or move it up a little and it will stay there. The music rack is BEHIND the lid so your music does not sit on any part of the lid

The SD chip is a marvel the 8mg card that comes with it can hold about 5 1/2 full floppies. It's an almost instant load. We took a medium sized midi file from disk, loaded it to the SD card, and then loaded it into the keyboard. From the SD card it took about 3 seconds!

the SD cards are already out and can be found at Best Buy Stores in the USA. ANY brand we were told will worj=k in the 7000 as long as it says SD on it. Several generic companies are maing them, just be sure it says SD on it. the largest out now is the 512. in a few months the larger ones will be available. The cards are capable of moving 1 meg of information in two seconds! That's faster than a CD. The 512Mg card will hold the equivalant of 356 disks!

The slide show demonstration was very simple AND very exciting. There is a separate track on the sequencer were you move the cursor to the measure you want a picture, and below are some menu choices as to whether you use the 100 pictures already stored on the 7000, or upload your own thru via digital camera thru the disk drive. the select the name of the picture as you would on your computer, then continue on moving the cursor to whatever measure you want the next picture to show and follow the same routine. You must allow at least two measures between pictures so the machine has time to clear out the previous and load up the new one. It was pretty simple to do.

What is neat about this is there is some talk with the Hal Leonard Music Company, who produces "Speed Music" to put these songs from the books on disk, and then the music could be shown on the screen as you play, and no more hard copy music on the rack, or no more page turns! Thank about that!! I was told you could do close to that now, by scanning in a page of music, save it as a BMP or JPEG, and then load it in as a picture file, and the slide show would show your music page as opposed to a picture.

As far as sounds, there is a new Accordian section added to the other two called French, so now we have German, Italian, and the new FRENCH Accordians.

The organ sounds will knock your socks off! They have been sampled WITH the Leslie speaker on this time. Previous samples were just the organ sound with "leslie" effects added by modulation - DSP. The "TAB" organ section actually has tabs that move up and down when you turn them off and on, and besides flute tones you have vox, string, reed, etc. seperate trems for the vox, mains, and flutes make for very realistic organ sounds. The music Sylist now contains another catagory called Organ sYtles and will bring up only the organ styles on the keyboard. There is also a new set of background styles for organ like organ waltz, organ fox trot, etc., on it's own button in the rythmn section.

NOW LISTEN TO THIS.... one of the programs on the CD taht comes with the 700 is called AUDIO RECORDER. With this program on your computer, and using the USB port connected to the 7000, you can make a CD in minutes! We did it in this workshop.... one song from the time we played it till we burned it on a cd it was about 5 minutes......Hear me out.....

you call up the Audio recorder program up on your computer and it looks like a tape recorder. on the left side of the screen are two VU meters on for Right one for Left so as you record you can see the signal strenght. on the right side is what looks like a cassette and under it are buttons: Stop, FF, Rewind, Record, Play. When your ready to play push the record button on the computer screen andplay your song on the 7000. As your playing you can see the little cassette picture move as if the tape is actually going round the spools. when you've finished playing, click on the Stop button, and your done. That simple. Now you have a MP3 file, save it, and put in a blank CD in your burner, open your CD burner program (We used Adaptec Easy CD Burner) Select "make an audio Cd that will play on any Cd player", select the name of the file you just recorded, and it goes right on your CD! no cables to hook up, no fussing with converting files etc., In our demo, we put a microphone in the mic jack and someone sang as another person played the keyboard, and the voice as well as the keyboard was on the CD and it sounded very profesional. EASY, EASY, EASY! AND if you have any other background stuff playing thru the line in ports that to will go to the CD as well.

There are two new sound cards coming out.. "Vintage Keyboards" whichi is due out in about three weeks, and in November "Super Sounds" which will have all kinds of sounds effects, voices etc.

this is just the tip of the iceberg, and my fingers are tired of typing are I'm a two fingered typer!

when I recover, i'll put on more!

thanks for listening, and you won't be dissappointed with this new keyboard.

Mark

Thank you Mark. Lots of new stuff in your post.

Thanks Mark ,for your report of the 7000,it was very interesting, Benno

A couple of clarifications to Mark's excellent report:

The black linear grill above the keys does not contain extra speakers, but does output sound from a port system.

The 8 MB card can hold much more than 5 floppies, and the 512 will hold much, much more than 356 disks (should you wish to pay that much for this card at this time).

The load is faster if you switch off the 'completed' message screen, I would say equivalent to a SX6 hard disk load. The custom section load is obviously limited by writing to the flash memory rather than the speed of the medium, since this is also the same as the SX6 hard disk time, but individual custom styles are the fastest load of all.

If you ever saw the Beethoven slideshow for the 6000 with score in the screen you will have some idea of the future software possibilities of the 7000.

The audio recorder makes cd quality stereo wave files at 16 bit, 44.1 kHz, which you use to make audio cds in an extremly easy procedure. You then have the option of converting these files to mp3 or wma (or aac) for reduced storage space and sd card audio playback.

If you thought the audio recorder was good, (you can perform this function also in any other wave recording program you already have eg sound forge, cool edit, cakewalk, cubase etc - and then use the many audio effect plug-ins available in these programs) you should see the navigation and file management features in the manager and jukebox programs.

Excellent reports. Well done !

Well, we're finally getting somewhere. Many thanks to Teemark for the clearly presented description of some of the 7000's features. Hope more of you who have the opportunity to audition this board will do the same. Since the literature is non-existent on the 7000 (as yet), those of us in the hinterlands have to rely on you guys to keep us informed.

if you use the search facility there is a great deal of 7000 information that has already been posted since last March.