How much time can a Tyros keyboard last ? 10 years ?

[dihelson]

Hello, friends,

I purchased my Tyros 5 in 2015, but we are now in 2018 and I used it very few yet. I´m concerned about how long a keyboard of this type can last without mechanical or other problem. In the past, I had a Roland Piano which took about 15 years to the keys begin to break apart ( plastic becomes weak ). Another keyboard, a Technics KN3000 was good till about 6 years, when the keyboard becomed very noisy and couldn´t be replaced by a new one, and the LCD died slowly. So, I know that using a keyboard or not very much, time passes, but there may be people with excellent Tyros 10 years old now, right or wrong ?

[EileenL]

There are still people out there using there Tyros 1 keyboards with no problem.

[Graham UK]

Had my Tyros 2 & NP30 bought May 2007 played every day...So far no problems with either...So 11 years in MAY

[rodrigo.b]

There are still people out there using there Tyros 1 keyboards with no problem.

You will not believe me but on my country, there are still people out using the Yamaha PSR 340 with no problem, and some people pay a lot of money for this keyboard.

[Toril S]

I have a PSR-47 that I bought in 1990. Still intact. There are some things you can do to make your keyboard last longer. Protect it frim direct sunlight. Do not place it too close to a heat source. Protect it with a dust cover when not in use. Keep it in a good case when traveling. Do not leave it in the car over night. Do not sit on it😀 Play it regularly, it is made to be used.

[dihelson]

It´s interesting. While I have a Yamaha DX7 almost as it came from Yamaha, ( Although keys are noisy by now ), it works. On the other hand, Technics keyboards died so soon ( A few years later ). And Roland also. The most common problem with them is on mechanism. Roland keyboard broke keys apart. Plastic is very bad. I noticed that my Tyros keys are no more extremely silent as in the first year, but so far, so good. And I play very soft.

[Doghouse Riley]

I've just upgraded to a Tyros 5 from a PSR 1000, which records  to floppy discs. It's 18 years old and is still in perfect working order, just put it on eBay.

It's a Yamaha "innit?"

[Craig Schiller]

There are still people out there using there Tyros 1 keyboards with no problem.

Indeed. I'm one of them.

[andyg]

I have a student with a PSR2000, which used to be mine, and was a Yamaha demo model before that, so it had a hard early life! It's still working just fine. I currently have a PSR-S900 and that's been well used for concerts and teaching. Never a moment's bother.

Look after them, they will last!,

[Kaarlo von Freymann]

Hi Everybody,

as has been correctly pointed out plastic tends to get brittle with age. the most durable "plastic" was the first one invented back in 1905, Bakelite,  polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, in case you prefer the chemical name.  YAMAHA'S  manufacturing experience is unique.  A friend of mine had a YAMAHA electronic organ in the early nineteen sixties  with what else, plastic keys.
 
The keys on my PSR 5700 manufactured in 1992 show signs of wear but no deterioration in the material. The keys on my Genos are actually those  from my Tyros 1.  I weighted them with lead inserts when buying my Tyros 1 in 2003 and have always transferred them to the next model.  They are 15 years old and have served me on Tyros 1, Tyros 3 and Tyros 5 and now  in Genos.
YAMAHA got the keys right at the very beginning of the Tyros series and they are still the same on Genos, no need to change anything. 
Also the electronics have become very reliable due to advances in  wave soldering and capacitor technology.  None of my YAMAHA keyboards has ever seen a repair shop. 
But software unfortunately is  another story.  Most manufacturers release new products well aware of the fact they have bugs. And Genos is no exception  - already 2 updates and still problems.   Probably my view that modern marketing strategies are indecent is not shared  by all on this forum.

Cheers

Kaarlo

[adrianed]

Hi Folks,

My T2 has a line down the display which came suddenly two years ago, I think very poor for such an expensive instrument when you think how many hours a television screen works

Adrian

[Kaarlo von Freymann]

I understand you are unhappy with the display.  As you might have noticed I do not belong to the  YAMAHA -FAN (or troll) category that claimed  Genos was wonderful after 1.2.  while it in my view still has bugs even after 1.3. that  for me make in unfit for gigging. But being a manufacturer of military target drones since 1968 I am well aware  of the durability problems of mass-produced electronic components. (and less wealthy due to them) And as a fact I have had many items like f.i. the Helicon Voice Works plus where the screen became unreadable shortly after the warranty had expired. And typically of course Helicon claimed it was me, the user, who did not understand how to use the item.  Fortunately I had two units and the other one was functioning properly so I sent them some photos showing I was not the idiot they tried to make of me  and finally they, to add  insult to injury,   sent me an authorization document to send the unit for repair.  Took them several months to fix it and they charged 40 % of the price of a new unit shipping included.
With YAMAHA my experience is in stark contrast. My Tyros 5/6 did not function to specifications even after update 5, which was after the warranty had expired. YAMAHA exchanged all innards free of charge and after that the unit has performed to specifications for many years though having to endure the dismal treatment at international airports and travelling on Finnish roads, which are not all even tarmac roads. And when it will brake I am confident the YAMAHA importer will have it serviced at an acceptable cost.

Cheers

Kaarlo

[sugarplumsss]

It depends on your temperament .. whether cautious or carefree
And not directly on the quality of the Tyros, but rather, on the discontinuing of the PARTS. I bought a keyboard in 2005 that I like.. but the PARTS are mostly discontinued. it makes little sense for manufacturer to spend the money on keeping all parts available, when there is little ( more likely loss of revenue )  financial reward to do so. We live in a world aimed at staying up to date.
If eg, a motherboard or key bed is no longer manufactured.. it CANNOT be fixed.

Staying more up to date keeps you safe from obsolescence.
Another option is to buy yet another used ( an inexpensive model of your current keyboard ) keyboard - and keep it for its parts.

The other problem is, you believe you are safe and secure with your ( fill in the blank ) Tyros 1,,  all that work in the data you spent years developing... and on the day that your board goes down... you are finished. I may be wrong on the details but if a Tyros 1 or 2 bites the dust , because of lack of parts.. can all the files be seamlessly brought over to a Tyros 5 or Genos?

[EileenL]

Its the luck of the draw. Some screens will last forever and some will develop faults. I had a television where the screen went just after it ran out of Guarantee. I remember the old S900 had a lot of screen problems and that was a fixed one.

[travlin-easy]

In more than 3 decades of performing on stage with an arranger keyboard, most Yamaha, I have never experienced a single, complete keyboard failure - NEVER!

Like Kaarlo, I also owned a PSR-5700, which was a true beast. It tipped the scales at 51 pounds, had great piano and vibes sounds, but only about 35 style files. That keyboard is still in use today, being played by a friend in Baltimore's Little Italy 6 nights a week, 4 hours a night. It continues to just keep on keeping on.

Mass produced electronic equipment no longer undergoes bench testing before being sent out. This is because the failure rate is incredibly small, despite what some tend to believe. It is reportedly less than 1/10th of 1 percent. The cost of bench testing each piece of electronic gear is insanely high and time consuming, thus the practice was eliminated.

As for the display on the PSR-S900, even after the warranty expired, Yamaha stepped up to the plate and replaced them at no cost. Not many companies would even consider doing this, but I know of at least two entertainers that had a problem with their Bose sound systems and both were replaced at no charge after the warranty expired.

Now, Kaarlo sincerely believes that the Genos is not an acceptable keyboard for on stage performers - to this I disagree. Admittedly, I only played the Genos for a period of 2 hours, but during that time, I was able to smoothly transition from one song to another without any dead time at all. I had no trouble finding my way through the menus and doing other things on the fly. The operating system, to me, was very easy to work with and it was my first experience with a touch screen arranger keyboard. The touch screen performed about the same as the touch screen on my cellular telephone, no hard or multiple pushes to get something to work. I was enthralled by the wonderful sounds produced by the keyboard and many of the new and old styles sounded fantastic. The store manager wanted to know if I would be interested in working there demoing arranger keyboards 3 nights a week. I turned him down for two reasons, my health problems, and it was a 3 hour drive to get there.

Over the years, I have repaired many, many arranger keyboards for friends who are pro entertainers. In most instances, the failures of those keyboards were 99-percent user induced. Some were ex-piano and accordion players, folks who tended to pound on those keys as if they had some sort of grudge against them. This destroyed the keypads in no time at all.

A couple guys had drinks spilled into their keyboards, which produced a sticky mess on the printed circuit boards. In some instances, I was able to just rinse the board with warm, fresh water, then dry it with a hair dryer and everything worked just fine. However, there were a few that I had to replace the sticky boards with new ones. One player, who was an excellent player and his wife was a fantastic jazz singer, destroyed arranger keyboards so fast that if he owned a keyboard for three months, if you saw it, you would think it was decades old. All kinds of dings, scratches and destroyed buttons. He used his thumb to mash down the buttons on the keyboard after they failed to respond to punches with his index finger. I ran into a lot of players who abused their keyboards during my 30 years on stage playing one. My keyboards looked as good the day I sold them as the day they came out of the box when they were brand new.

Bottom line, the longevity of your keyboard is totally up to the user. Take good care of it and it will likely outlive the owner.

Gary

[Mikk]

There have been many occasions when I have repaired/revitalised a keyboard  due to dust. the biggest offender has been older Rolands,  dust getting under the key contacts. I have been doing this for over 15 years now, buying keyboards off our main  auction site called "TradeMe"   Most of the keyboards are auctioned because random keys have stopped sounding. Often the price is $1.
      I strip them down and clean them up and resell them for maybe $200- $400 dollars. I used to use carbon-tetro-chloride. Now banned due to the detrimental effect on the ozone layer. I now use  Iso-propyl-alcohol.
     
           A big issue with damaging the electronics of a keyboard is smoke.  especially if you have your keyboard in the same room as a wood burning heater.  Most smoke contains carbon which as you know is a excellent conducter of electricity. It can infiltrate your keyboard and after a time an start to short across circuits boards causing all sorts of weird effects then will eventually cause components to fail, especially if there is any slight dampness in the room.

I had a fire recently which started to spread to my music studio. I managed to get  some keyboards out before the fire took hold on the studio, but eventually the room was filled with smoke and  some water from fire hoses.  some equipment was completely burnt up, but much seemed to be untouched, due the many blankets/dust covers over keyboards etc.

         A few days later when I had recovered mentally  I tried a couple of the keyboards that looked fine and the worked perfectly. 

        When it came to the cleanup the insurance company insisted that those keyboards be smashed up and dumped.  they said that due the smoke/carbon deposits it could cause another fire in a few months, which they may be involved with.

       The company doing the clean up smashed up with big hammers all equipment that looked undamaged, so that it could not be used by anyone else.

[Keynote31]

I bought a used PSR 9000pro around 14 to 15 years ago, and as I used it a lot bought a second one as standby "just in case". I never needed it as the first one was just as good when I traded it in for a 970 a couple of years ago..So reliable even though it was lugged around quite a lot for various gigs including playing fot concert parties etc....It was a great keyboard (in my humble opinion much better that the early Tyros series).The only reason I changed is that the software was becoming somewhat outdated... I have now upgraded to a T5 which appears to be very sturdy and I hope it will last.Meanwhile I "discovered" my reserve 9000pro in the loft and that has now gone to a good home.
Look after your instrument and it will last. Happy playing!

[Kaarlo von Freymann]

I bought a used PSR 9000pro around 14 to 15 years ago, and as I used it a lot bought a second one as standby "just in case". I never needed it
.....Look after your instrument and it will last. Happy playing!

Hi Keynote31,
I very much agree with you,  YAMAHA keyboards - I have no experience with other brands since Tyros 1 came out - may have too many bugs in in early OS versions just like Genos, but they will last for longer than you might want to use them due to new models having new desirable features.
I would not hesitate buying an old Tyros 1 if it looks well taken care of and I felt I do not need the features of later models. My Genos actually has the keys from my Tyros 1, (plus the extra octave I bought for Tyros 5/6)  which I weighted and always transferred to the next model.
That is why I  LOL when people post "the Genos keys immediately felt so much better" They are the same as on Tyros 1. and they will last forever  provided you play on them normally and take care of your fingernails, if YAMAHA is still using the same plastic, which I believe they do.

Cheers

Kaarlo

[AlBags]

My first decent keyboard was a PSR-2700 (sampler) I bought and brought back to UK from Chiang Mai, Thailand dealership in 1993 (It was half the price of UK!)
The common problem used to be the old shallow black-on-greed LCD displays used to fade and get lines down it, and also the power supplies went down and ran hot.

Our friend above with the display with lines on could probably easily get a replacement display panel cheaply. You can still get one for PSR-2700.

I remember mine used to confirm in spoken voice  'ARE YOU SURE' frequently.
Sampling was great, but Floppy Discs pain in the bum to use!

Al