Hi,
I find it amazing that everyone keeps talking about how expensive technics keyboards are in comparison to other brands.
Here in Aust. they have a recommended retail of $7,000AUD. I managed to get mine for just over $4,000 brand new for cash ( meaning NO Trade in, NOT cash under the counter)
The Tyros which retails for possibly just a fraction more, would have cost me between $5,200 & $5,500 in short, I would have been paying 20% more to get a Tyros, and from the same dealer.

Obviously it pays to shop around, and not accept the first price quoted.

best wishes
Rikki

Hi,
actually pretty clever of technics. Obviously if one wants Technics styles from KN6000 up, one has to buy a KN keyboard. There again it hasn't stopped Technics owners KN6,7 from being able to convert styles from other manufactures as it has style conversion facilities on board via a program supplied on floppy disk. Styles converted via EMC to kn5 format can also be played on kn6,7.
To my mind, KN7 has some of the best & easiest to use style editing & style creation features available.

best wishes
Rikki

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Alex K:
- Does EMC style conversioni program include support for the Technics' styles? I recall that Technics told EMC not to include su簯rt for KN6000, for fear of litigation. Has this changed?

"Obviously it pays to shop around, and not accept the first price quoted."
best wishes
Rikki

This is another problem with Technics (in USA) I can only buy it from the dealer in my area. I tried to get quotes from dealers in other areas, I was told their contract with Technics prohibits them from selling to a customer in another dealers region.
Even if I could find an out-of-town dealer willing to violate this contract provision,
I would still have issues if the keyboard needed service.

There are many places I can buy a Yamaha keyboard from. (George Kay, Dano, etc..)

Yamaha's pricing and dealer network makes it easier to buy a keyboard at a competitive price.

I need to weigh in here. I work at a Retail Piano store in Sacramento and I sell Technics. I also Own a KN7000. I speak with the Technics Rep (Dan Uter) on a fairly regular basis, and I also speak with Chris Halon at times. I would tend to agree about griping about retail cost of the KN7000. The 'List" is really whatever we want it to be- but I have never sold a kn7000 for over 3,200$. Usually I will sell it for $3000 out the door. You cannot blame techincs for the way the dealers act. Make an offer. If a dealer is stupid and rejects it, then tell him to go stick the keyboard -you know where- and go buy one from me or Ebay. Technics has been very active as of late in trying to break into the MI market (guitar center etc) the problem is that the market is so saturated with other brands that Guitar Center cannot carry them. Yamaha and Roland and Korg pitched a fit because they knew that if a KN7000 was in guitar center for $2600 then they would lose ALOT of sales. So Technics has stuck the KN7000 in the "Home Market" for now. They really have no other option.


On the Harmonizer subject: Please do us a favor and do not buy the KN7000. If you are dumb enough to base purchasing a 7000 on the Harmonizer ability then you are missing a screw in your head. Get a dedicated unit. Trust me- They are much better than ones you will find in keyboards (yes even Ketron and Yamaha). I believe the KN series has a "midi implementation patch" with the Digitech Vocalist workstation as well just for that purpose. Also- If you dont know how to sing- then the Mic input will sound pretty bad regardless of the harmonizer feature. Why anyone would think that a 9000pro or Tyros is better than a 7000 because it has a better harmonizer is beyond me. What really matters to me is that you cannot even assign MIDI tracks on a tyros or 9000pro (such as drums to track 10). That is a basic MIDI function and it has been left out intentionally by Yamaha. That to me is a bigger problem than a crappy harmonizer,

My 2 cents. Ben

Actually, the joke is on the owners of Technics keyboards (this is as clever as requiring owners of the Technics keyboards which did accept hard drives to purchase the extremely overpriced drive assembly from a single supplier from Germany).

What this policy does is to deprive owners of the KN7000 keyboards from being able to play converted styles while taking advantage of the improved 7000-series sounds - I guess you have to do manual editing to do that.

I am glad you are enjoying your keyboard. Perhaps you could also address my other questions from that e-mail (e.g. the number of intros, endings, fill per style, what is the limit of the SD-card memory supported, etc.)

Regards,
Alex

4 variations, 2 fills, 2 intros/endings. Memory capacity is unlimited with SD.

and thats 2 fills and intros/endings PER variation.

biggest sd card available as of now is 1 gig. 4 gig next year and 8 gig year after that. Solid state. No noise. No moving parts.

At $349 for a 1 gig sd card compared to the price of a hard drive...and with much more space on it the thing can make as much noise as it wants to! Nay it can sing the Hallelujah chorus.....I'll just play louder Not to give the option of a hard drive at least until sd prices fall is just like technics.

To be fair it is nice to see technics embracing new technology but as a past and once loyal owner of technics boards it has always been a case of paying over the odds for goodies to beef it up.

I find it amusing that people (technics owners?) are so offended at the criticism of the crappy harmoniser. Get real....THEY SHOULD HAVE LEFT IT OFF! As it stands it is an insult. I bought the 6000 when it came out because it was an awesome board at the time....however I and many many owners like me were insensed with the harmoniser that was after all advertised as a pro quality on board harmoniser. The KN6000 forum (remember that!) was full of peeps who felt cheated. There were other probs with the board as well but we won't go into that!

You would have thought that Technics would have learned from that but they left it on the 6500 and as far as I am aware it is exactly the same unit on the 7000?

There has been an adequate harmoniser on Yammie boards since the 8000 and how long ago was that? I have a 9000pro now and to be fair never use the harmoniser but at least I know that should I want to it will function as a harmoniser should.

Don't give me all that twaddle about not buying a board for the harmoniser either cos that is not my beef. I have air conditioning in my car. I don't use it often because I live in cold dark England but should we have a warm day I don't expect to press the button to find that it don't work properly. If the manufacturer says it is there then it better had be when I try it.

Whew....feel better now
In Harmony
Tony W

Hi Alex,
I never bothered with hard drives for earlier models because of price, but my kn7 doesn't need a hard drive . It has a nifty little feature called an sd card. Very portable. Means I can take my little card plug it into any kn7, and I've got my full setup. Amazingly it also gives me audio options, like being able to play mp3's in sync with the kn7's sequencer. Handy for playing audio loops , adding vocals, in fact anything that can be recorded via the kn7's input, can be saved as an audio file and played in sync with the sequencer. Means when I do record an mp3, i'm not stuck with recording it via my crumby laptop's sound card, it actually uses the kn7's.
Editing and replacing sounds is an absolute breeze.
Personally I'm not all that fond of style conversions. The style usually doesn't sound anywhere near as good as it did on the original. i prefer to work from a midifile whenever possible. I used to record my pro 9000 styles as midifiles , then use the sequencer to style function on the kn to create the style. ie Record intro's , variations, fills endings into the chord of c. Takes 5 minutes in steptime. Sold my pro the other day so now I'm using xg works instead. Discovered it does it even quicker. From there I take note of where the differing parts finish and end. Load the midifile into the kn sequencer, and copy the parts into the various composer sections. Again it only takes a few minutes. The more difficult part is getting the sounds and volumes to all blend together. The reason I do it this way, is that I can pick and choose which intro's fills and endings , I want to use. Using EMC the program actually chooses the parts, not me. ie it picks which of the 2 out of 3 intro's on the pro to use. Not necessarily the ones I want. I'll probably do the same thing for any of my VA7 styles I decide to convert.
I've always, from any of my previous keyboards, saved my styles as midifiles as well as the styles themselves, just in case the EMC style convert didn't give quite the result I wanted.
KN7 2 maj intro's, 2 min intro's , 2maj 2min ending's. Fill 1, Fill 2 button , but there's a different fill 1&2 for each variation ( so 8 fills in total)
The highest I've bothered with to date is 256mb. Personally I've split files up onto different cards. ( my choice only) I've got my styles on one card. My audio files on another. And sequencers & midifiles on another. The sd card has a structure of 99 folders. Each folder has 20 locations for saving composer styles , sequences, custom styles, pads etc.
I can save all the above to one of the 20 locations or just one of the files.
My style card. If I actually saved the styles as a composer style, I'd be able to fit 99x 20= 1980 styles, but if I actually save them as custom styles which use far less memory than a composer style(custom is similar to flash styles in the psr) I'd be able to save 99 folders x 20 locations x 20 custom styles = 39,600 custom styles, depending on the cards capacity. I've got over a thousand full composer styles on my 128mb card and it's nowhere near full if I saved them as custom files, they'd barely make a dent.

best wishes
Rikki

it