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In Reply to: recommendations for upgrading my keyboard posted by fiestafry on July 6, 2005 at 16:33:59:
I've just gone through a similar search and bought a Yamaha S90. It's the best piano sound that I've heard on a pro keyboard. Yamaha's midi pianos for the home are better and sound really wonderful, but this is still pretty damn good. Someone tweaked the piano patch and came up with some new voices (link below). His take on a Bosendorfer voicing is much better than the voicing that comes with the unit.
Yamaha's expensive piano plug-in board for the S90 is a piece of junk. The stock voices are much better. The brief listen that I gave to the orchestral voices was disappointing. The solo violins/violas/cellos are really horrible and the massed strings aren't great, but there are a few gems in with the dogs. Roland has an orchestral plugin board that works with their JV-1080/XV-5080/Fantom XR/XV-2020. The Roland's sounds are generally better than Yamaha's, so you might want to consider getting one of their modules in addition to the S90 keyboard. The XV-2020 is a $600 sound module, so it's a pretty afordable addition. Roland's acoustic piano sound is pretty lame compared to Yamaha though, and I certainly didn't think that it was good enough to use as a stand-alone piano.The S90 has a very well-made lead weighted action that feels better than any of the competition. It's a pretty stiff action, but it doesn't take too long to get used to if you're used to playing a real piano. If you come from an unweighted keyboard, it might take some time to get your finger strength up to its demands, but the piano sounds are very nice played softly, with a lot of dynamic shading at low velocities.
The best sounding piano out there, is "Ivory": http://www.synthogy.com/ It's a software piano that needs a fast hard-drive (preferably not your main hard drive), and tons of RAM--2 gigabytes is a nice amount of RAM for it. I've tried the Macintosh version and it sounds terrific. When the Windows version is released (sometime this summer they say), I'm getting it. I've tried a number of other software based piano modules. None of them comes close to Ivory and the S90 is the equal of the best that I've heard of these.
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Follow Ups
- Re: recommendations for upgrading my keyboard - Paul_A 20:12:41 07/06/05 (0)
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