Fantom G (What it should have been and it's Specs)

Smurf, it'll pass a century before someone create a workstation with your specs, lol. 8GB of Wave ROM ahaha.

Deleted!!!!!

Considering that Jim Stout has told that an additional 128 voices of poliphony would cost a thousand dollars more, just with the poliphony you've mentioned it'd cost $8000, and 8GB of Wave ROM? It'd be my dream machine (but the cost it'd make the Oasys cheap), it means that you have all the instruments carefully sampled with ALL the articulations. Considering that a workstation sounded pretty good also with 16/32 MB of ROM(for that year of course, but some older workstation sounds pretty good today too, so do your consideration. 8GB of Wave ROM.... I'd like it so much.

Open Labs already has over 25 gigabytes on its timbo edition

Sorry to post here but I cant seem to start a new thread ,is there a problem.

Where are all the roland fantom g videos from roland at the Namm show

Okay -- YOU ASKED for it -- YOU GOT it!!!

MY specs for the ultimate Fantom...

Piano-type keyboard

PBM (Physical Behavior Modeling) enables the true tone and expressive characteristics of the world’s finest, um, synthesizers... yeah, right...

Additional sounds onboard, including piano, organ and strings

Eight user programs for instant storage andrecall of your favorite settings

Lightweight for young students and travelingperformers

Pad function for triggering percussion sounds and rhythms

Song function for “minus one” play-along fun

Battery powered for convenience and portability

And if you thought that this was weird... well... let's just say that I didn't invent any of this. It is all right on Roland's web site...

- Sammy

Chubbylove the ROM in a workstation is total different story, openlab doesn't have onboard ROM, it's hardisk space not ROM. Openlab products are Windows XP based.

whats the difference?

Why is polyphony so expensive? they doubled it from my s88 series to the x series, but they didnt double the price.

They just dont give you everything today because they wont have anything to sell you tomorrow.

The difference is huge, you're confusing on board ROM with another total different thing. If you want to achieve the quality of a standard workstation in your computer (take for example the multisampled guitar of the motif XS, if you want to achieve the same sound on a PC you need a multigigabytes library, instead on the Motif XS it resides on the on board ROM that is "only" 355 MB, and I repeat on the PC you need at least 4-8 GBs of samples). This applies also for other instruments. Take the Oasys (for now just leave the cost out of the argument) and the new Brass and Woodwinds Expansion, it is very realistic with many articulations on every instrument(fall down, fall up, staccato, swell etc.) and it took just 700 MB, if you want to have the same details and articulation on a PC with VSTi you need at least 14GB (that is 20 times bigger) of samples to have the same effect, and in the PC it's not so intuitive playing a multisampled multiplgigabytes library on a PC.

Chubby, I think it's a matter of keeping the cost down, jim Stout has told that, and I think that is reliable as source. if they doubled the poliphony and added more things, the cost would be much expensive, and we'd complaining that the cost would been higher, the major problem to me it's that we want features, we want big ROMs on board but we don't want to pay for that. That's the problem. Now people complain of the no poliphony increase and about the size of the ROM, but if they'd offered more we'd complained about the increase in the price, as happened for the Oasys. Am I wrong?

Mauro:

You are correct, and most of us realize this. I suppose that the question that we have to ask is this: Is it more important to have a big, bright, pretty, and fun-to-use color screen -- or is it better to have 256 voices of polyphony?

IF we could have both, great. I don't think that it is possible, unless you are going to charge, you know, Oasys prices. Roland would price themselves out of the market so fast that they would be forced to go back to producing, I don't know, BOAT engines or refrigerators or whatever it is that they do in Japan.

My self, I would prefer the 256 Poly. I think that it is more useful, especially given that the Fantom G is, apparently, aimed at live musicians. Sure, it might be kinda cool to have a touch screen and / or a mouse, but when I play live, I don't care that much about the display.

This might be a miscalculation on Roland's part. We'll see if it pays off, or whether musicians will say, "hey -- I'm not going to be looking at this great screen -- I'm going to be looking at PEOPLE IN THE AUDIENCE!!!" (Which is, by the way, what every live musician is taught to do.)

If I were buying a live synth? I would buy an Alesis Fusion. Cheap -- $800. Polyphony? I believe that the sample playback engine can play something like 272 voices, and around 170 with the VA synth. You can even mix and match the VA and ROMpler synths.

But this isn't ALESISClan -- so I'm not endorsing one product or the other.

- Sammy

Am I wrong?

Nope; you're right. When a manufacturer designs a new product, they typically overdesign a product. They make it very powerful, very flexible, and therefore, very expensive. Then the marketing people come in and say "Listen, we need to hit this price point. Period. It has to sell for this." Then the engineers start stripping things out.

If Roland's going to sell the Fantom-G6 for $2899 list, the only way they can up the polyphony to 256 is to rip out a lot of other stuff.

This isn't rocket science—it's Economics 101. Hell, most of it's common sense.

I suppose that the question that we have to ask is this: Is it more important to have a big, bright, pretty, and fun-to-use color screen -- or is it better to have 256 voices of polyphony?

I agree with you here although the diffrence in PRICE between the Fantom X's screen and the Fantom G's screen is probably $50 to $100 at the MOST.....

There would be a LOT of other stuff that would need to be ripped out....

I think they could have maybe done with 4 sliders instead of 8...and as far as I am concerned they could LOOSE the D(amn) beam AND that useless V link feature!



Hell I dont know WHAT could have been done to make it "better" but no matter WHAT they do some of us will not be happy

I agree with you here although the diffrence in PRICE between the Fantom X's screen and the Fantom G's screen is probably $50 to $100 at the MOST...

Probably, but keep in mind that the price of the new G is way more than the cost of its collective parts. Implementing the mouse, programming the new GUI engine and interface, rewriting and optimizing code... The R&D probably added up. Suddenly that $50-100 is a lot more.

There would be a LOT of other stuff that would need to be ripped out...

Agreed. Polyphony is intrinsically tied to the synth's main processor chip (or chips). Increasing polyphony in the Fantom-G would most likely require duplicate chips, and those chips are probably the most expensive part within the unit, much like the Intel processor is often the most expensive part within a computer.

Hell I dont know WHAT could have been done to make it "better" but no matter WHAT they do some of us will not be happy.

I could babble for many pages on what Roland could do to make the Fantom-G better. But what could they do to make it better at the same price? Not sure. I'd like to think I have a marginal grasp on manufacturing techniques, but Roland sure seems to have hit it out of the park with this one. I was really expecting the G to cost a grand more.