PSR-EW410 @266€

[EB5AGV]

Yesterday I got what could be a heck of a deal!. I will have to wait some days for it to arrive, but that price, which includes 21% VAT, was too good to pass!

More in few days... 

Jose

[vbdx66]

Hi Jose and congratulations for your purchase it will be a nice addition to your keyboard collection.

Regards,

Vinciane

[EB5AGV]

Hi Jose and congratulations for your purchase it will be a nice addition to your keyboard collection.

Regards,

Vinciane

Thanks!

Just last week I grabbed a barely used CT-X5000 so now I will be able to compare them side by side 

Jose

[vbdx66]

Waow many people here will be looking forward to this comparison.

I just bought the CT-X800 and I like it very much, I am hesitating between keeping it and trading it back for the CT-X3000. Wait and see.

Vinciane

[EB5AGV]

Well, it has finally arrived!. There was some problem with the transport and it has been a week travelling around Europe...

I have got a somewhat bashed box but, fortunately, the keyboard was close to perfect, except for a bulge on the rear side, due to a dislocated top cover. I have been able to get some discount from the seller due to that problem... which has been later easily solved by removing three screws and it has popped to place automagically  !

So final price for my unit has been 244,50€ 

It had the accesories bag unopened so even the manual is mint!. I love these Amazon reconditioned offers, most times you can get real bargains as this one.

I will play it, integrate on Cubase and then will report back my findings. I love the interface being so similar to other Yamaha units. It makes the learning process very fast. I can't say the same of the CTX-5000 user interface 

So far, I am a happy camper! 

Jose

[vbdx66]

Hi Jose,

Congratulations for your new keyboard, I am sure you will have a lot of fun with it. Many people here will be curious to know the advantages and the disadvantages of the PSR EW410 as compared with the CT-X5000.

I had a PSR E463 (basically the same unit as the EW410 with 61 keys and without the nicer Live! Grand Piano sound) for a couple of weeks after having returned the CT-X3000 but I didn't keep it, because even though the user interface of the Yamaha is so much friendlier than that of the Casio, the sounds of the Casio were so much better (to my ears at least) that I could not satisfy me any more with the sounds of the PSR E463.

I think it would be time for Yamaha to record new samples for its PSR E keyboards, like Casio did last year for its CT-X line.

For the moment, I am quite happy with my DGX650 and the CT-X800. The CT-X800 is really great fun. Much better keybed and speakers than the PSR E363 in the low-range keyboards.

Still hesitating to take a CT-X3000 back, though, because in spite of its horrible UI, it seems to have endless creative possibilities. I might just keep the DGX for pure piano playing, the CT-X800 for fun and portability, and add the CT-X3000 later to my collection for music creation.

Regards,

Vinciane.

[SciNote]

Yeah, Casio has some great hardware in these new CTX keyboards, but like you said, the user interface is confounding.  As I previously wrote in another thread, while I was experimenting with a CTX keyboard (either the 3000 or 5000; don't remember which one), I came up with a cool piano/string type sound, but when I was done, I had little idea as to how I got to that sound!

Also remember that, while the CTX-3000 and 5000 have a 17-track sequencer, on 16 of those tracks, you can only record one voice at a time.  And by that, I don't mean that you are limited to monophonic play (as you can still play and record chords), but that if you combined two voices with "Upper1" and "Upper2", it will only record you playing the "Upper1" voice.  It would be like setting up a complex sound using the Main and Dual voices of a PSR-E400 series keyboard, but only being able to record yourself playing the Main voice.  Of course, with the PSR-E400 series sequencers, that is not the case -- you can have a sound made up of a Main and a Dual voice and when you record to any of the five melody tracks, you will get the full sound of the Main and Dual voices combined, as long as there is enough available polyphony.

Who knows?  Maybe Yamaha will start taking these keyboards in a different direction, as they have already kind of branched out with that PSR-E360.  With the competition offering things like portamento, directly editable and storable sounds, and a more advanced rhythm/style section, they may realize that they have to up the ante on the newer models.  I just hope they don't take away the live-control knobs and mess up the user interface in the process.