just my two cents: I wrote a SRX-12 review for the German "Keyboards" magazine.
This board is the most important of all modules for my personal use. For me the SRX-12 is the most outstanding board of all, because it convincingly delivers quality instead of quantity.
Agreeing with 'cgreene', two instruments are represented first class:
- The Rhodes simply is the best hardware Rhodes on the whole market. Not even the Korg Oasys offers comparable quality here, and all the standard workstations are just poor jokes concerning an authentic Rhodes sound - for everyone who really knows the original.
This, by the way, counted in no way less for Roland up to the SRX-12. In the past they have been building either *much* too dull EPianos or the type of idiotic sounding "plink" "plonk" EPianos up to the Juno G which only allude to famous sounds without remotely delivering them. Even the "Ultimate keys" SRX 07 offers only sick and trashy Rhodes sounds for my ears. And the original FantomX or the Juno do not even have *one* *single* Rhodes sound worth mentioning.
But the SRX-12 Rhodes really works and shines, and is even much better than the Nord Electro Rhodes.
There are only two better Rhodes sounds out there:
- an original Mk I in excellent condition
- or the Scarbee software libarary which simply sounds 1:1 just as good as the original. It clearly outplaces everything on the market with 12(!) instead of 4 single note velocity layers and an absolutely natural reproduction of the oringinal. Not even the SRX-12 plays in this outstanding class.
Concerning the SRX-12: first of all you have to fine-tune the velocity layers, because the Roland company guys simply failed to do a good job here, and the difference between the layers comes in quite abrupt jumps in the factory settings, instead of smooth crossings.
- The D6 Clavinet is just as great, covering all(!) pickup settings: in sound and feel *extremely* close to the original, just like the Rhodes. You can do simply *any* traditional funk sound or modern r&b with this thing. Overwhelming fingerlicking good!
The blind spot of the SRX-12 is the Wurlitzer, which is a complete failure. This is the only case where the FantomX original sounds are better than the card extension. But since some FantomX Wurly sounds are at least middle-class, together with the SRX-12 you get a super instrument covering all the classic vintage EPianos in good (Wurly) up to excellent (Rhodes and Clavinet) quality. For me these sounds altogether are at the core of all my music making.
Sounds funny, but I bought a Juno-G for the only reason of using the SRX-12 with it, and later I ended buying a Fantom X7 as my main instrument - the SRX-12 again playing a major role in this decision together with nice workstation features.
If someone at Roland would finally wake up and produce an SRX-13 with a high quality B3 they would - together with some of their quite useable Piano sounds - finally cover ~75% of the bread-and-butter-sounds most keryboarders use most of the times.
But as we all know, especially the Japanese management guys, who often show good understanding for technical know how, at the same time show very limited understanding for many musicians' wishes and regularly need much too much time to be up to date here finally. As far as generalisations can be used at all, over the last years their worst general character failure has been their missing ability to make constructive use of critical feedback from European or US users, and this way they pay a high price for wrongly assuming that they know everything conerning the company better than anybody else out there, all by themselves.
So we should be thankful that some of them have been smart enough to deliver the SRX-12 with 2/3 of what it should be.
