Yamaha MX88 or Roland DS 88

[Melodymaker]

Rolands do sound Roland-y and Yamahas do sound Yamaha-ish. If you prefer many of your Yamaha sounds to its Roland equivalents, I suspect you'll prefer the sound of the MX88 to the DS88. Comparing in a store could be tricky though... the best brass sounds for the DS88 would be the ones you can download and install for free from axial, but they won't be in a store demo. If you want to get ambitious and the store owner doesn't mine, you could download them onto a USB stick and load them on to the floor model to check them out.


Definitely more limited than the Roland in terms of what you can do from the board itself, but I don't think it's necessarily more limited overall than the MX88. But also, you can do a ton of more advanced stuff on the SP6 from the free computer editor. You might want to download that and play with it (you can check it out without having an SP6 attached).


Artis 7 is a great board. The 9 sliders and all the buttons for direct patch selection are especially nice. Also reminiscent of your current Yamaha, a solid build with an internal power supply. But as with all of these, really, a lot may come down to what you think about the action. (I found some lighter springs for mine which I preferred.)

Rolands do sound Roland-y and Yamahas do sound Yamaha-ish. If you prefer many of your Yamaha sounds to its Roland equivalents, I suspect you'll prefer the sound of the MX88 to the DS88. Comparing in a store could be tricky though... the best brass sounds for the DS88 would be the ones you can download and install for free from axial, but they won't be in a store demo. If you want to get ambitious and the store owner doesn't mine, you could download them onto a USB stick and load them on to the floor model to check them out.


Definitely more limited than the Roland in terms of what you can do from the board itself, but I don't think it's necessarily more limited overall than the MX88. But also, you can do a ton of more advanced stuff on the SP6 from the free computer editor. You might want to download that and play with it (you can check it out without having an SP6 attached).

Rolands do sound Roland-y and Yamahas do sound Yamaha-ish. If you prefer many of your Yamaha sounds to its Roland equivalents, I suspect you'll prefer the sound of the MX88 to the DS88. Comparing in a store could be tricky though... the best brass sounds for the DS88 would be the ones you can download and install for free from axial, but they won't be in a store demo. If you want to get ambitious and the store owner doesn't mine, you could download them onto a USB stick and load them on to the floor model to check them out.




Definitely more limited than the Roland in terms of what you can do from the board itself, but I don't think it's necessarily more limited overall than the MX88. But also, you can do a ton of more advanced stuff on the SP6 from the free computer editor. You might want to download that and play with it (you can check it out without having an SP6 attached).


Artis 7 is a great board. The 9 sliders and all the buttons for direct patch selection are especially nice. Also reminiscent of your current Yamaha, a solid build with an internal power supply. But as with all of these, really, a lot may come down to what you think about the action. (I found some lighter springs for mine which I preferred.)

Artis 7 is a great board. The 9 sliders and all the buttons for direct patch selection are especially nice. Also reminiscent of your current Yamaha, a solid build with an internal power supply. But as with all of these, really, a lot may come down to what you think about the action. (I found some lighter springs for mine which I preferred.)

Thanks for that info, I had read sometime ago in various reviews that some people were not happy with key action on the Artis 7. It's not a cheap board so having to do spring conversions is a strange situation. As I understand you were not the first to do this and probably won't be the last.
I wouldn't fancy buying a brand new board and then having To go to that bother.
Likewise with the DS88 from what you say it must be lacking in some sounds if you have to download them to get
Something acceptable. I think from what I have observed recently, Yamaha aren't the company they used to be.
There seems to be so many disgruntled people that won't by the brand anymore. I have to say that my 9000 pro has given me 17 years of trouble free service and can't really fault it. But for wanting to move on to pastures new
I would use it still but she is very heavy. If I didn't care about weight I would have had a used S70 or S90.
I'll look up the download for the SP6, thanks for that.

 

[anotherscott]

Thanks for that info, I had read sometime ago in various reviews that some people were not happy with key action on the Artis 7. It's not a cheap board so having to do spring conversions is a strange situation. As I understand you were not the first to do this and probably won't be the last.

True, but some people like it the way it is, it's the kind of thing that's worth trying for yourself. I feel the same way about the Nord semi-weighted actions, btw.

Likewise with the DS88 from what you say it must be lacking in some sounds if you have to download them to get

It's an interesting approach. In a budget instrument. it would have been unjustifiably expensive to build in the full range of high quality sounds in their SRX library. By providing enough rewritable-but-persistent memory to hold one "expansion set," each user can choose which of the SRX sound sets are most important to him or her, or even swap out different ones for different projects. There's actually more total wave data simultaneously available in the DS88 than the MX88 but the Yamaha set is fixed, and the Roland set is part fixed and part changeable.