P.s. Also no dealer in ohio sells the Tenori-On. They can order it for you, but you won’t have a chance to demo the product beforehand so you’re basically rolling the dice on purchases because you don’t know what you’re getting. These companies don’t do anything too see that their product gets out there in retail departments. Except for korg and more recently Roland.

SHUJINCELL - 12 August 2010 07:02 AM

I would love to see a modern day version of the Oasys, I think the market needs it.

So, you have the Oasys?

That is the point being told here: Yamaha COULD make a machine with all their different tech inside. Heck, call it the EX2011 and sell it for $9995. It would be a fantastic product. And I guess as many as 10 people in the world buy it…

These aren’t the times of the Synclavier anymore when producers spent more than a hundred thousand dollar on a workstation, people have cheaper alternatives. The time the Oasys came out home-production was extremely popular, but these producers didn’t buy it. Why? Because they didn’t need it.

Companies in the music industry have to figure out what musicians still buy hardware synthesizers and workstations and focus on them, as you can’t compete with the PC market. PC’s are getting cheaper and more powerful everyday and if you are no keyboardist I think you would prefer the ‘out of the box’ solutions because you get more bang for the buck.
Yamaha, Korg and Roland can only focus on the people who need a real instrument with an intuitive user-interface (the keyboard players I guess).
So instead of just copying all the functions of a PC to the machine, figure out in which situations you need a hardware synth or workstation.
Until now Yamaha did the best research I guess, because I see more Motifs than M3’s and Fantoms. Even the price of the XS still stands after more than 3 years.

They are most successful because they DID NOT create an Oasis ...

And the Oasis ..... discontinued; due to success?

;JOOP!

I don’t think the Oasys was a failure because a lot of professional people bought them. I’ve seen a young girl in GC buying one at $7999. Because she says all her producer coworkers use them at her record company job. I think Korg estimated just how many they would make and sell. And they sold all the ones they made at that price and made a profit from it. The Oasys was a limited edition high end synth concept more than an ongoing synth line entry. That’s why they never made a 61key version. All synth companies are gonna make you pay exactly for what technology you get and nothing less. 

Same with Yamaha. If they added all the stuff people asked for on this website you are guaranteed to pay for it, no matter how less it cost for them to make. Synth companies sell keyboards on market value and not cost value. Whatever high cost they can get for it on the street then that’s what it sells for. That’s why companies don’t drop prices on keyboards because they sell well. If they were a failure then the price would drop and quickly.

Yamaha can make up your dream come true workstation for a cheap price if they wanted to. But they never will, because they don’t have to. They’re not that stupid to put themselves out of business at your request. All you ever gonna get from these manufactures are keyboards that make you want the next model that comes out from them next. And that’s why some of them go backwards to start over in technology.

The only dream come true synth manufacture was Ensoniq. Then hell opened up and we had to wake up from what we thought was a developing synth and sampler keyboard revolution.

If you think Korg is so clever, then have some trust in Yamaha.

;JOOP!

I already know the deal with Yamaha. They’re deliver everything they set out to deliver in advance for this new XF concept and very little else. That’s until you buy their next step after this in keyboard technology. Even if they make a new revolutionary keyboard with synth expansions, etc. You still will be left with something that you wish they could have included and considered very very important to you, that they left off that is considered highly wanted or needed.

Then you may buy the next keyboard with that feature with something else missing from the last keyboard design. It’s all marketing.

I don’t understand this.
Every company that does it differently disappears.
Don’t you want to be able to buy a new Yamaha in 10 years?
Then keep them alive.

Besides:
who understands a Classic will know his/her way with the XF.
Were you waiting for something else with, again, a steep learning curve?

;JOOP!

by kday:

The only dream come true synth manufacture was Ensoniq

I don’t know about that. Ensoniq was very small compared to Yamaha. They were based in Philly and my music reseller sold their products. I owned a TS-10. It worked well and was very reliable. But Ensoniq got themselves in trouble financially and folded. That was really too bad.

But Yamaha has been designing and making musical instruments a lot longer than Ensoniq ever was, and is the music company that others would like to be and employees of other companies would love to work for instead of their own.

I’m not saying Yamaha is the perfect company, but it is formidable. Personally, I own Yamaha products that I bought brand new in the seventies. Everything I ever bought from Yamaha still works fine and I got more than my money’s worth. Its better to buy products from a company that’s products eventually become obsolete as some of mine are now, than buy from a company that goes out of business.

Cheers,

Mike T.

P.s. Also no dealer in ohio sells the Tenori-On. They can order it for you, but you won’t have a chance to demo the product beforehand so you’re basically rolling the dice on purchases because you don’t know what you’re getting. These companies don’t do anything too see that their product gets out there in retail departments. Except for korg and more recently Roland.

Bummer, about not being able to try out the Tenori-On in Ohio. It does take a more forward looking dealer because the product is so radically different from anything else. The unit was in short supply the first year of its existence - demand far outweighed supply… now that it is generally available you’d think stores would be into it, but you have to live in an area that ‘gets it’. Come to NYC (lol).

Yamaha certainly makes it available to dealers everywhere… whether they carry it or not is not up to the company (it is still a free country) the dealer can choose to carry it or not.

On the contrary, Yamaha does everything it can to get the products to stores. Mention to your local Yamaha dealer that you are interested and ask when can you can get to see one. The dealer will ask his district sales rep and that is how you can get someone to come (even to Ohio) to show you one. The sales rep will bring one by - or arrange to have one show up so YOU can get your hands on one.

But if you don’t communicate with your local dealer, nothing happens. Who is your local dealer? ... I get to Ohio (myself) several times a year!!! I’d certainly bring my Tenori-On with me - it always gets smiles when I demo it at airport security. I’ll be in Ohio sometime between now and the end of the year with the XF… I’ll be sure to bring along my Tenori-On, as well!

kday - 12 August 2010 10:00 AM

The only dream come true synth manufacture was Ensoniq. Then hell opened up and we had to wake up from what we thought was a developing synth and sampler keyboard revolution.

I loved Ensoniq and it really sucks to this day that they are gone....I always thought they had top notch sounds that was ahead of their time...I actually still have an SD-1 32voice and an MR-61 sitting around that I dig out and play around on from time to time...You’d be surprised how similiar the MR-61 and the XS are in basics of getting around the keyboard....I’ve grown very attached to the XS much like the Ensoniq’s...The simple pattern based sequencer with great FX and sound pallette make recording enjoyable again....ZR

Bad_Mister - 12 August 2010 09:15 PM

P.s. Also no dealer in ohio sells the Tenori-On. They can order it for you, but you won’t have a chance to demo the product beforehand so you’re basically rolling the dice on purchases because you don’t know what you’re getting. These companies don’t do anything too see that their product gets out there in retail departments. Except for korg and more recently Roland.

Bummer, about not being able to try out the Tenori-On in Ohio. It does take a more forward looking dealer because the product is so radically different from anything else. The unit was in short supply the first year of its existence - demand far outweighed supply… now that it is generally available you’d think stores would be into it, but you have to live in an area that ‘gets it’. Come to NYC (lol).

Yamaha certainly makes it available to dealers everywhere… whether they carry it or not is not up to the company (it is still a free country) the dealer can choose to carry it or not.

On the contrary, Yamaha does everything it can to get the products to stores. Mention to your local Yamaha dealer that you are interested and ask when can you can get to see one. The dealer will ask his district sales rep and that is how you can get someone to come (even to Ohio) to show you one. The sales rep will bring one by - or arrange to have one show up so YOU can get your hands on one.

But if you don’t communicate with your local dealer, nothing happens. Who is your local dealer? ... I get to Ohio (myself) several times a year!!! I’d certainly bring my Tenori-On with me - it always gets smiles when I demo it at airport security. I’ll be in Ohio sometime between now and the end of the year with the XF… I’ll be sure to bring along my Tenori-On, as well!

ROFL yea unfortunately the solution for advancing in just about everything in this area is to relocate. Nice to know we kinda have an option to get stuff out here. Our stores out here are Guitar Center and Sam Ash. The downside to that is, I don’t know why, they’re operated exactly the same so you can guarantee they’ll have the same gear.
I’m from the columbus and I’ve been to every single music store in the state and they all carry the same items. Yamaha is the last on anyones list out here. Its mostly because the way the people are out here. They go with the gear everyone else uses or what someone tells em is good. Korg and Roland get the most support out here.
There’s many devices we don’t have available in store. In some cases most of the gear is stuff headquarters couldn’t sell and shipped to is because they knew they couldn’t sell it or ran out of space.
It a sad reality to me because Yamaha is last on anyones list out here when it comes to workstations and most instruments that aren’t traditional ones.
As I was saying with the Oasys, no store out here has ever seen most companies products, no Access, nothing Nord, it took my local store 2.5 months after launch to get Korgs microsampler, no expansions for any device whether its Yamaha, Roland, or Korg..
So long story short we miss out on a lot of devices because of our market.
When its not capable of much out of box and requires devices that aren’t within reach, it makes it very hard on us and make others go with the other brand with the cheaper expansion parts available in store because the owner of the store has to choose a brand he knows will sell. (sorry for long txt, on my phone LoL)
So I don’t mind the Motif US (UltraSynth) that s designed to do everything.
I think every manufacture should have a keyboard that uses their very advanced technology. 2 years ago I had the impression the xs,m3’fantom were that. So in response to Rob, no I don’t own the Oasys. I went to the guitar center in Hollywood 2 years ago and had the chance to play one and I was impressed. Reading the specs I didn’t want to believe in it because I thought it was a pc in a box. I was wrong. Synth + multi track recording mixdown especially for its time is very impressive to me. Ill definitely would get one if I could buy one locally. It definitely wasn’t a failure if they’re still using technology from it in their new workstations. I would buy the PCI VER. If they mad a dedicated controller for their softs. I can keep dreaming all day but its old technology and they can do better.

bad_mister next time your in ohio let me know. Ill have you performing at a club with the Tenori-On LoL.

So, still no crossfade loop or step recording?

Oh sorry, did I hijack your thread?!

I think that Foleycore and radurobert think that things are created because they want them, instead of being created because they can make money for a company.

Every company that ever gets completely taken over by irrational dreamers and hippies gets only a chance or two, if that, at making anything before they go bust, and their customers are left holding the bag.

The oldest lessons in our synth workstation history, the Fairlight CMI and the Synclavier, are the very root of this point. Those machines sold well in the beginning because there was nothing like them. In 1980, what would you use for a sampler/sequencer workstation besides a Fairlight CMI? Two years later, the Synclavier could stream one track off of a super expensive hard drive if you bought the super expensive sampling option, and that wasn’t real sampling. If you wanted what we think of as a sampler/sequencer, you bought the Fairlight. You got a mortgage, and bought the Fairlight. It quickly was a staple of big studios. Didn’t matter that it cost $50,000 back then. It was all that could do the job, and people made money with it, so why not? But they both had reasons to be proud of their monster machines. The Fairlight sounded real as anything back then, and the Synclavier was the most powerful synthesis system available.

But Fairlight and New England Digital didn’t understand what was going on. They were new companies with a first block buster product, and had not been around long enough to even have time to think about a long view. They were revolutionary machines when they came out, and I think they all got too stuck on always wanting to be revolutionary.

The E-Mus and the Ensoniqs came out, complete with their crappy 8 and 12 bit sampling. Fairlight and NED still had them on features and the name. They could have with the advances in computers, worked to bring their prices down to even half of the astronomical original prices, while still improving quality. That would have kept them on top, while making their systems available to a larger market. Instead, they were too stuck on that idea of being revolutionaries. If a massively powerful $80,000 system sells well, they must have thought, then a fuckingly overblown death star of a system would even bring in more money. When that didn’t work, they made even larger models. Do people know that, before NED went out of business, the Synclavier, in 1986, did 16-bit sampling and playback at 100Khz with 16 voice polyphony? And that wasn’t your typical 16 voice polyphony. That was the “lets include an individual 100Khz DAC for each voice” 16 voice polyphony. “Oh, and how about we include 16 track hard disk recording, too?” Hell, all you needed was $400,000, and it was yours! And that’s late 80’s money. That’s about $800,000 today, according to the Consumer Price Index. The most advanced home computers for multimedia production at the time, like the Amigas, Apple IIgs, etc, could only handle a few voices of 8-bit sample playback, and cost $3,000+. Plus, for the Synclavier, you had to pay $5,000 per year for software updates, because the $400,000 you paid for the machine wasn’t enough to keep the programmers working. Needless to say, bigger wasn’t better.

At the same time, people on a budget had Ensoniq, E-Mu, Akai, and others for sampling, and E-Mu had cheap romplers by then. You still had to put the pieces together, and it wasn’t as nice (just like it is today with rigging up a bunch of computer gear, software, and external equipment to record), but you could do it. A year or so later, the Korg M1 came out. MIDI your Korg M1 to a sampler, and you had your sequencer/sampler workstation, for $395,000 less than the Synclavier, as long as you could live with only 44Khz sampling. Almost no one could afford the Synclavier, and practically no one needed it, at least not everything that the last models could do.

In a way, it would have been interesting if they could have held on through the early 90’s. Would have been crazy to see what came next. 400Khz sampling at 64-bit resolution with 512 dedicated DACs, for only $2,000,000. The Oasys is only something similar on a smaller scale.

bsmart - 29 August 2010 09:27 AM

I think that Foleycore and radurobert think that things are created because they want them, instead of being created because they can make money for a company.

Every company that ever gets completely taken over by irrational dreamers and hippies gets only a chance or two, if that, at making anything before they go bust, and their customers are left holding the bag.

The oldest lessons in our synth workstation history, the Fairlight CMI and the Synclavier, are the very root of this point. Those machines sold well in the beginning because there was nothing like them. In 1980, what would you use for a sampler/sequencer workstation besides a Fairlight CMI? Two years later, the Synclavier could stream one track off of a super expensive hard drive if you bought the super expensive sampling option, and that wasn’t real sampling. If you wanted what we think of as a sampler/sequencer, you bought the Fairlight. You got a mortgage, and bought the Fairlight. It quickly was a staple of big studios. Didn’t matter that it cost $50,000 back then. It was all that could do the job, and people made money with it, so why not? But they both had reasons to be proud of their monster machines. The Fairlight sounded real as anything back then, and the Synclavier was the most powerful synthesis system available.

But Fairlight and New England Digital didn’t understand what was going on. They were new companies with a first block buster product, and had not been around long enough to even have time to think about a long view. They were revolutionary machines when they came out, and I think they all got too stuck on always wanting to be revolutionary.

The E-Mus and the Ensoniqs came out, complete with their crappy 8 and 12 bit sampling. Fairlight and NED still had them on features and the name. They could have with the advances in computers, worked to bring their prices down to even half of the astronomical original prices, while still improving quality. That would have kept them on top, while making their systems available to a larger market. Instead, they were too stuck on that idea of being revolutionaries. If a massively powerful $80,000 system sells well, they must have thought, then a fuckingly overblown death star of a system would even bring in more money. When that didn’t work, they made even larger models. Do people know that, before NED went out of business, the Synclavier, in 1986, did 16-bit sampling and playback at 100Khz with 16 voice polyphony? And that wasn’t your typical 16 voice polyphony. That was the “lets include an individual 100Khz DAC for each voice” 16 voice polyphony. “Oh, and how about we include 16 track hard disk recording, too?” Hell, all you needed was $400,000, and it was yours! And that’s late 80’s money. That’s about $800,000 today, according to the Consumer Price Index. The most advanced home computers for multimedia production at the time, like the Amigas, Apple IIgs, etc, could only handle a few voices of 8-bit sample playback, and cost $3,000+. Plus, for the Synclavier, you had to pay $5,000 per year for software updates, because the $400,000 you paid for the machine wasn’t enough to keep the programmers working. Needless to say, bigger wasn’t better.

At the same time, people on a budget had Ensoniq, E-Mu, Akai, and others for sampling, and E-Mu had cheap romplers by then. You still had to put the pieces together, and it wasn’t as nice (just like it is today with rigging up a bunch of computer gear, software, and external equipment to record), but you could do it. A year or so later, the Korg M1 came out. MIDI your Korg M1 to a sampler, and you had your sequencer/sampler workstation, for $395,000 less than the Synclavier, as long as you could live with only 44Khz sampling. Almost no one could afford the Synclavier, and practically no one needed it, at least not everything that the last models could do.

In a way, it would have been interesting if they could have held on through the early 90’s. Would have been crazy to see what came next. 400Khz sampling at 64-bit resolution with 512 dedicated DACs, for only $2,000,000. The Oasys is only something similar on a smaller scale.

u think wrong . In fact u have no logic. I made some inexpensive request for my XS 6 improvement. For Yamaha is inexpensive to accomplish that. U speak nonsenses. I need more flexibility with XS for studio setup that’s all.I need only a few improvements. Is about sound banks management, more powerful sound expansions… I don’t need more than 128 voice poly or some other stupid requests.I need what is really necessary for flexibility .See my other post > Motif Rigidity

ZombieRaider - 13 August 2010 02:11 AM

kday - 12 August 2010 10:00 AM

The only dream come true synth manufacture was Ensoniq. Then hell opened up and we had to wake up from what we thought was a developing synth and sampler keyboard revolution.

I loved Ensoniq and it really sucks to this day that they are gone....I always thought they had top notch sounds that was ahead of their time...I actually still have an SD-1 32voice and an MR-61 sitting around that I dig out and play around on from time to time...You’d be surprised how similiar the MR-61 and the XS are in basics of getting around the keyboard....I’ve grown very attached to the XS much like the Ensoniq’s...The simple pattern based sequencer with great FX and sound pallette make recording enjoyable again....ZR

Yeah I missed Ensoniq innovation myself. They were way ahead of their time. First to create the workstation concept in their SQ-1 keyboard and first to create the affordable most sophisticated sampling keyboards. American companies usually originate brilliant ideas but don’t stay in the game for the long run. Ensoniq, Moog, Sequential Prophet, Oberheim, EMU, etc all once dominated their markets but went out of business from not developing new creativity and technologies. Speaking of sampling I remember when Akai used to make a gigantic S1100 sampling keyboard which was cool but they abandon the sampling keyboard market for MPC beatbox samplers until they tried to add sampling in the Fusion synth they came out with a few years ago. None of the big 3 synth makers of today have ever thought about making a dedicated sampling keyboard yet. But synth Romplers are staying consistent in their upward progress thankfully, otherwise the synth market would be near dead too. Creativity in design keeps the market fresh and the buyers buying. That’s the reason analog makers of the past stop making synths because they ran out of ideas and buyers from making the same old synthesizers year after year with no creativity to design or new technologies other bigger and more expensive models instead of the sequencer/sampler/digital/hybrid ideals that the big 3 have taken.