Dexibell Combo J7 demo ...

[Delaware Dave]

Traveling in Texas close (relative term) to San Antonio I stopped in the Sam Ash store as they have a Dexibell Combo J7 on demo. I was hoping this keyboard would be the Gemini rack in a 73 key keyboard that I have been looking for. Its not

 

The keybed is 73 waterfall keys with the feel just slightly heavier than a TP9 keybed. Feels very synth like in playability. Lets get straight to the sounds:

 

Organ: About on par with my Kurzweil PC3 for organ and probably just under it from a leslie perspective. The leslie has a weird sound in the horn that is difficult to describe. It doesnt quite sound like a spinning horn, more like a spinning whistle. Although the C/V doesnt sound too bad it does not interact well with the leslie, especially with the higher drawbars. One of the things that makes the leslie sound bad out of the box is the RPMs, the horn was set at 26 for chorale and 387 for tremolo; and the drum was set at 34 for chorale and 407 for tremolo; so the drum rotates faster than the horn. I reset the horn to 48 slow and 365 fast; and the drum to 40 slow and 320 fast. It sounded better but still not right. The drum has no depth to it; it was hard to tell if it was spinning fast or not because of the lack of depth; the horn has this shrill pitch with the 5 1/3, 2 and 1 drawbars that was quite unnatural. Hmmm, I wonder if a Vent could fix it? Alas, no separate output for organ, but wait there is a panpot function at the program level. I panned the organ left but the panpot did not work for organ; I also panned the organ right and still no panning occurred. I was able to pan non-organ sounds but they do not fully pan; if it were a tiny residual that wouldnt be so bad but in fact when a non-organ sound is hardpanned either left or right it is only about 85% panned, about 15% still comes the other side; so panning is out which rules out a Vent; unless you want to bother dealing with the Vent by-pass switch all night; no thanks.

 

Piano, has the VIVO piano in it. I would rate the acoustic piano perhaps a hair better than my Kurzweil PC3; they are very close, Id give the Dexibell the slight edge.

 

EPs; absolutely no better than the Kurzweils EPs, perhaps a hair worse. The one EP I did like was the Phased Rhodes. Sounded like Fagens Rhodes.

 

Brass, strings on par with the PC3 while the synth was below par.

 

Overall, I was quite disappointed and after about playing with the keyboard for an hour I actually got bored. It does have motorized faders and they were extremely light to move, in fact they were too light, i.e. they had hardly any resistance. Another thing I noticed was that the V/C and the percussion had buttons and if you hit them fast they would double trigger, ie. if on, they would go off then back on, or vice versa; you couldnt hit them too fast, you had to be very deliberate with them. All in all, I was not very impressed with the offering at all. The case was plastic and the build was not of great quality. It weighs about 23 pounds (nice and light) it seemed to be compact. Not much bigger than a typical 61 key keyboard, about 41 inches wide.