Lazerlike42

I'm not so sure. I think with some technology it's getting pretty close:

There's certainly truth to the idea that a good musician can make good music out of just about any sound, but I don't think that's ultimately the point of discussing the similarity of an electronic instrument to the acoustic it's based on. Mozart would have written great and timeless music if the only instruments available were winds, of course, but that wouldn't mean that he would be unjustified in wishing he had strings as well. If I want to perform piano music but the closest thing I have is an RD1000, I might still be able to make some good music, but that doesn't mean there's no value in or reason for wanting something that sounds closer to a real piano.

Something else I was surprised to learn is that you can't assign the faders. If you could, like on almost any other board, I'd probably have bought one already (or a modx). As it is, I'm going back and forth between various options, all of which seem to have a flaw that's a significant downside to me. The faders are that flaw foo the Yamahas.

I think there's a very real sense in which romplers haven't gone nearly, nearly far enough. The reality is that even lower quality computer based sample libraries totally blow the very best romplers away and it's been that way for many years. We can discuss costs of ICs and hardware and other factors, but the bottom line is that the very, very best romplers that cost thousands of dollars can't compete with a $50 Garritan Personal Orchestra or $15/month EastWest subscription, much less some of the even higher quality stuff that's available. Heck, Ivory II came out more than 10 years ago and consisted of three pianos which took up about 80GB. Today, fans of romplers laud something like the Montage's CFX piano samples which take up 1GB when uncompressed. Now I'll admit that that CFX piano actually sounds pretty good. It doesn't match most of the piano libraries that you can buy these days, but it's still got a good sound to it - but that's the piano only. When you start looking at stuff like samples of strings or brass or other instruments, the Montage or the Fantom or the Kronos are so far from the standard set by these libraries that it's hard to overstate it. Now for many uses these sorts of hardware devices are adequate, but my point is just that they don't even begin to reach the standards of what other technology can produce these days - or for the past decade or more.

Let me put it this way: if I had an income four times what I do, I'd never consider Fantom-0 or Modx - but I don't and so these boards are a great "blessing," to use the term loosely. They give myself and many, many others the chance to do what Fantom and Montage do where we'd otherwise simply not be able to have it at all. Imagine a world in which the only wristwatches were Rolexes and so (at least until the advent of cell phones) only the wealthy got to tell time while everyone else was stuck looking for wall clocks all the time, or where the only cell phones were the top of the line Apples and there were still phonebooths everywhere because the middle class and below couldn't have a mobile phone. Sure, I'd rather have the nice chassis and better action and so forth, but I far, far prefer these less luxurious versions to a world where my options were either the Fantom/Montage I can't afford or the Go-Piano or DGX. So sure - leaving aside the question of cost, why would one ever want a board with the cuts made like the Fantom-0 has, when the flagship Fantom is available? Nobody ever would, and if money is no problem for a person then they're going to see the Fantom-0, Modx, etc. as products that are bad for them - but to people who can't afford $5,000 for a board, these options are great and the cuts feel pretty reasonable. I may as well complain that the $150 Yamahas they sell at the box stores are lousy compared to the Modx, but these keyboards aren't for me. They're for a different market.

In other words, it sounds like you're saying this behavior is the standard. If the Fantom isn't doing what you want and no other major product does, what board are you using as the "standard to meet" which does actually do it?

The way anotherscott describes it, it sounds like the Electro has no MIDI at all, not something "less versatile." That said, I think there's a pretty clear and objective case here. The criticisms people are making of the Fantom-0 all seem to come down to some aspect of the build that isn't as high quality as on the flagship, whereas the "criticisms" being made of the Elctro are about things it literally [i]won't do[/i] that the flagship does. In fact, saying " If you needed the second panel and all that functionality, you'd just buy the Stage, because you really need a "first" board" sortof gives the whole game away, doesn't it? There's very little that a person can't [i]do[/i] with a Fantom-0 or ModX that they could with the more expensive board. There are a couple of exceptions, but otherwise it does everything else exactly the same and any cuts have been made to the tactile experience or build quality or that sort of thing. It's sortof like the difference between a Rolex watch and a $10 digital watch - they do the same thing, but one feels more luxurious. From the sounds of it, the difference between the Electro and the Stage is more like the difference between an old iPod Touch and an iPhone of a similar generation: the build and "luxury" feel might be the same, but one does very meaningful things that the other simply can't.

I don't have an answer for the Fantom-0, but I've seen you asking about this a lot and I'm curious if you've had other boards which do allow this? It wasn't exactly the same application as I recall, but I seem to remember some years ago trying to work out something similar and having to choose a very specific controller to make it possible.

I don't do anything live, but it seems to me that the difference between all-in-one vs. a second board seems like a pretty big difference.

Certainly there are always tradeoffs and the reality is that those tradeoffs can certainly be hard to accept at times, but for many of us we have no choice but to learn to accept one set of tradeoffs or another. For instance, I'm in the market for a board right now but going up to $3,000 or $4,000 is not a possibility and so I need to decide what tradeoffs I can best accept. One reason I've not yet made a purchase is that I'm having a hard time doing that. I think the flagship Fantom is ideally what I'd want. If I had the money for that, it would be an easy choice, so I'm having to choose between: Fantom-0. Has a lot of what I want: a wide range of controls, expandability, diversity in the sort of engines available, an okay keybed. My hangups are that it's acoustic and electric pianos do seem significantly hampered right now by a bare-bones SN implementation, and to a lesser degree the sort of stuff you're talking about, the sense that "it could be better". This especially makes it harder to write off weaknesses of other options and easier to like their strengths. RD88. Also has a lot of what I want: a similarly decent keybed, the stronger acoustic and electric piano sounds that the Fantom-0 lacks, the same expandability options, albeit with lesser storage potential, decent controls. In a sense it's all the Fantom-0 would be for me but for much less money, BUT my hangups are that its "real-time playing versatility" is less - i.e., much less potential for setting up splits, layers, triggers, etc., and in particular that these features are all very similar, but lesser versions, of my current 700NX so they will stand out to me. RD2000 which it looks like I can get used for an affordable price at a place within a day trip. In a sense it might be the strongest in terms of the great keybed, the versatile piano and E-pianos, and the strong controls. My hangups are that I'm honestly not THAT much a fan of the V-Piano sounds on the RD2000 and in terms of it's other, non-keys options, it's a lot weaker and without really any expandability beyond old RD sounds. Of course I do have VSTs for all the non-piano stuff, but... I like the idea of hardware. Modx. Feels in some ways like a middle ground. The keybed is probably the worst of the list but manageable. The versatility for programming might be the strongest - at least as far as the engines it has go. The sounds are the blessing and the curse here: I think some of them are very nice, but a lot of the rest sound terrible to me, especially any of the acoustic sounds which involve sustain. For instance, the looping or vibrato or whatever it is on the strings sounds like a machine gun at times. My point is just that yes, you're right that a downgrade will always feel like a downgrade, but at the end of the day I'm like a lot of people in that there is a limit to what can be afforded and so ultimately tradeoffs are a necessity. I'm glad these mid-tier units exist because it means there's *something* for people like me, even if it's not the best of the best.

Leaving aside questions of just how close the Electro is to the Stage (as I'm not knowledgeable enough about Nord to comment on that), the Yamaha and Roland midranges are about 55% less expensive than their flagship counterparts, while the Nord is about 29% less- and the less expensive Nord is still about the same price as the full Roland/Yamaha and so completely out of the price range of the kind of people who are going to be interested in the Modx or Fantom-0. The Nord may be a great instrument, but I don't think it's all that great a comparison here.

I've not had a chance to see one of these in person, but I'll also add that as someone looking into getting one, these Fantom-0s certainly seem stripped down less than the average mid-tier board. For example, keeping almost all of the knobs and faders is something I've not really seen before in one of these mid tiered boards. Even if they're of lesser quality than the equivalent controls on the full board, I'd still much rather a slightly lower quality version of all of those controls than the highest quality version of only half of them or fewer (and I'm not saying they are of lesser quality - I haven't seen them firsthand - I'm just making the point).

I can't give an exact explanation, but apparently the way that expansions are stored involves compression, meaning that you can get a lot more stuff on the board then the numbers would seem to suggest. I could be mistaken, but I THINK some people have previously commented on some examples of how much stuff can be fit earlier in this thread. If not, it may have been this one: https://gearspace.com/board/electronic-music-instruments-and-electronic-music-production/1375752-roland-fantom-0-series-06-07-08-a-11.html

Yes, it does. If I'm not mistaken it's slightly different from past implementations: rather than being sort of "built in" to each tone/patch/whatever they're called, I think it's added on as an MFX, but I could be wrong about that. Either way, it has it.

After al lot of digging it does seem like (unless someone wants to correct me) the SN pianos on the Fantom-0 (and the Fantom) are extremely stripped down. They're apparently lacking any kind of resonance along with things like tone/nuance and almost all of the other sorts of things that to a large degree made the SN pianos what they are - and this is with a release that includes around 30 different SN pianos. I really don't understand this decision. Do they plan to add these things in an update? Is it part of a strategy aimed at pushing people to get the flagship Fantom with the V-Piano? I realize that for a board like the Fantom having perfect sounds for one particular instrument isn't really the point, but it still just strikes me as such an odd thing to do given that these sorts of things are a big part of what makes SuperNatural instruments what they are, especially when they've included these kinds of features on the Fantom's predecessor the FA and when they have a boatload of other SuperNatural sounds on this one that has all of these sorts of things. For me personally, it makes what would have been an easy purchase a no-go: it's just such a small thing (I'd think, anyways) given the tradeoff.