DavidK

I have been doing some further tests on the FA-06 and found out more about the key velocity issue. There does indeed seem to be a problem with the response of the Supernatural piano sounds, and I have sent my findings to Roland UK. Hopefully, if other users also send Roland some feedback, this can easily be fixed with a firmware update. It's remotely possible that there was a problem with the unit I have been testing, but I would think this extremely unlikely. The black keys on the FA-06 seem to trigger the Supernatural piano sounds with a velocity of around 15 more than the white notes when played hard (i.e. near 127), making them stick out unacceptably. This is really obvious if you play an even chromatic scale up and down the keyboard. Strangely, there is no such problem on any of the other sounds, e.g. '76 Pure. It's such a shame that these problems are occurring in current keyboards - they never used to. The Yamaha MX49/61 has black keys that play quieter than the white keys (opposite to the FA-06!), and Yamaha UK have acknowledged that there is a problem, so hopefully this will be fixed soon.

I tried out the FA-06 today in my local PMT store in Bristol, England, and was very impressed. However, I immediately noticed that the black keys were more sensitive to touch than the white keys, this being particularly noticeable on the main supernatural grand piano sound, causing black notes played hard to sound too loud and too bright. Has anyone else noticed this? I found that if I played something in C major, using only the white notes, the response of the piano sound was perfect. However, in any other key, the black notes stuck out in volume and brightness too much when hit hard compared to the white keys. Hopefully this problem will be addressed in a future firmware update. Also on the FA-06, I noticed that repeatedly plugging in and out a pair of headphones (I was comparing two different ones) caused the patch I was playing to go very quiet in volume; when the patch was changed and then returned to, the volume went back to normal. This problem was not specific to the FA-06 - it also happened on the FA-08 which was located above the FA-06 in the PMT store. I would be interested to hear other forum members' experiences of these issues.