Members Analog & Digital Posted February 28, 2014 Members Share Posted February 28, 2014 In my opinion, for how little this costs compared to other boards out there, it seems to be about the best deal right now..... - Full Motif XF sound set..... - 88 hammer action keys..... - 128 note polyphony.... - 8 insert effects....just like the XF..... - You can add up to 1 GB of flash memory..... - it has almost 4000 (3977) samples built in it to make sounds and you can stack up to 8 to make a voice, and you can stack up to 8 voices to make a performance......that means performances can have up to 64 sounds layered at once.....(at about 2 note polyphony.....lol).....just an extreme example....... - about 33 pounds...... CONS: - You can load samples (flash) but can't sample..... - no aftertouch.....---------------------------------------------------------------It's really not far feature-wise from the $3500 Motif XF8 and tons lighter....... The Motif XF has 130,000 note sequencer that DOESN'T have a step sequencer included...... The MOXF8 has 226,000 note sequencer with step sequencer....... $1700 & free shipping and no tax at musicians friend dot com (you might be able to sample with the included software)....... Here's a demo of all the preset voices in the MOX (the previous model with 64 note polyphony) but I think all these sounds and a lot more are in the MOXF8......the MOX8 had 2670 waveforms for making sounds and the MOXF8 has almost 4000 (3977) and 128 note polyphony and 8 insert effects :Yamaha MOX Demo - ALL 1217 voices in 100 Minutes ! This link has a zip file with Yamaha MOXF8 photos, voices & manuals including voice names. The voices need you to install a flash board before you can load them as they have samples:https://www.dropbox.com/sh/etc4dcb3mj3ucxw/KSjOQFGIRi/Yamaha%20MOXF6%20-%20MOXF8.zip Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members dan88z Posted February 28, 2014 Members Share Posted February 28, 2014 It is a great keyboard for the price. I'm using the S70XS and there are things I like about that board that the MOXF doesn't have, aftertouch, which is nice but not a requirement, but the keybed on the S70XS is fantastic. I don't like the wheels at the top on the MOXF, only because it'd be my bottom board and the wheels would be covered by my Hammond. I don't mind the extra length to have them at the end of the board. I'm in the market for a replacement for the XS, and I've considered this one, but I'm leaning more towards the new Roland FA08 to have the sampler built in, since I have the SP404-SX that I use with my Floyd band already, between that and the sequencer built in I can eliminate the sampler and laptop for sequences. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Analog & Digital Posted February 28, 2014 Author Members Share Posted February 28, 2014 The S70 XS is really nice......that has the top of the line keys on it.....I considered getting it too but it doesn't have a sequencer and I use sequencer a lot.... .One thing I did find out is my piano (Yamaha P-70) has much quieter keys than my Motif 8 (the original Motif)......Yamaha replaced the keys (including labor) for free on my P-70 and I think it has is same keys as the MOXF8......I'm not sure if my Motif 8 has the same keys as your S70 XS.....it's probably been upgraded since then......Yamaha replaced the keys for free on my Motif 8 (including labor) as well so it has newer keys than the original keybed.... One thing I found out is that on older Yamaha synths the aftertouch quit working after a while.....both the DX7IIFD I have now and the one I used to have didn't have working aftertouch......hopefully I won't have the aftertouch go out on my Motiif ES6, but as of now on the ES6 it still works but the DX7IIFD is a really old board by now.....that must have come out in 1986 or 1987.....also the floppy in my current DX7IIFD will read floppies but will no longer save to floppies and I was told there is no longer a replacement made that will fit in it (it wasn't a standard floppy disk drive)....I wish that Yamaha would have used a standard DOS file format like they did on my Korg Karma floppy.....when it's DOS you can backup the floppies with Windows.....my SY77 floppy disk drive wasn't DOS either....neither is my Alesis Data Disk....I might try to change my Alesis data disk over to a newer drive that has floppy, USB and SD card reader in the same sized drive.....Tiger Direct sells those for about $20......I'd like to put one in my Korg Karma too....I don't have my SY77 anymore (I use the rack now, the TG77)......the SY77 & EX5 had bad timing problems with their sequencers that Yamaha corrected with the Motifs.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members keybdwizrd Posted March 1, 2014 Members Share Posted March 1, 2014 The MOX boards are an awesome value. I don't care for weighted action keyboards, but I have the MOX6. I plan to upgrade to the MOXF6 mainly for the additional insert effects. The Korg Kromes are very competitive and cheaper, but I prefer the MOX sounds, and the MOXes have better keybeds and overall build quality. I am looking forward to trying the new Roland FAs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members sani Posted March 1, 2014 Members Share Posted March 1, 2014 keybdwizrd wrote: The Korg Kromes are very competitive and cheaper, but I prefer the MOX sounds, and the MOXes have better keybeds and overall build quality. I decided for the MoX too while also trying the Krome. I have to say, I don't see one single thing where the MoX would be better quality wise (I'm not talking about the sounds since this is always subjective). It's built completely from cheap plastic. The Krome has at least a little bit of metal on the surface. Even the keys feel very very similar with the bad thing that the Krome 61 keys have a design error in the way that it's almost impossible to hit a key if you trigger it at its end. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Gumimaci Posted March 2, 2014 Members Share Posted March 2, 2014 FA06/08 kills the MOXF; for about the same price it has double poly, and double insert effects, 16 in number, which for the first time in this price range solves the lack of insert effects in the combi/multi mode. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members sani Posted March 3, 2014 Members Share Posted March 3, 2014 Gumimaci wrote: FA06/08 kills the MOXF; for about the same price it has double poly, and double insert effects, 16 in number, which for the first time in this price range solves the lack of insert effects in the combi/multi mode. The poly on the Fa depends on the processor load. You are not certain about the maximum poly and you should know that. The more SN sounds you play, the higher is the processor load and you have less of polyphony. How much, you'll never know.Effects and the way how they are implemented is a matter of discussion for over a decade know. Yes, the Fa has 16 of them, ONE single effect on each part. What if you need a compressor/phaser effekt on a certain part? What will you do then? Fa resolves absolutely nothing here. You have one effect per part. It will be often enough and there will maybe be situations where it wont be enough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RockPianoman Posted March 13, 2014 Members Share Posted March 13, 2014 Every time I ever try to buy something Roland, the acoustic piano is always a huge disappointment.....even with the dedicated piano SRX cards.....and listening to supernatural acoustic pianos, they still aren't as good to my ears....this is nothing but my personal opinion but people always give very positive feedback about my Yamaha acoustic piano sounds at shows.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members keybdwizrd Posted March 30, 2014 Members Share Posted March 30, 2014 I have since played the new Roland FA08 and FA06. I have no interest in using weighted keyboards to play non-piano sounds, so I gravitate towards synth-action keyboards. That being said, I was able to compare the actions of the MOX8 and FA08 directly, and prefer the FA08. I also prefer the action on the FA06 vs my MOX6. The sounds in the FA instruments are largely fantastic. Personally, I find the FA pianos to be perfectly acceptable and very musical. I prefer the Roland SuperNatural pianos on my Jupiter-50 to the pianos in my MOX. The color screen on the FA instruments is absolutely AWESOME, and the user interface is very intuitive. The build quality of the FA and MOX are about the same, although the FA has a bit cheaper look to it. I don't like the shiny plastic used for the main front surface. And, as previously noted, the ability to add 16 insert effects to all 16 parts in multi mode on the FA is absolutely KILLER. It is likely that I will be selling my MOX6 and getting the Roland FA06, as soon as finances permit. That being said, I am mostly going all software these days, so I don't really need an FA06 anyway. But speaking directly to the title of this thread, I have to say that the Roland FA instruments give the best value for the buck right now. Yamaha needs to up their game and come out with a NEW MOX with a large, color screen and 16 insert effects. The crappy little screen on the MOX just isn't going to cut it any more. They will lose LOTS of sales to Roland until they come out with a spectacular, new MOX. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members AnotherScott Posted March 30, 2014 Members Share Posted March 30, 2014 Each has significant advantages over the other. Yes, the FA has many advantages. Besides those mentioned, it has clonewheel and VA synth functionality, sample pads, and an assignable aux out. OTOH, with the flash card option, you can load up to a gigabyte's worth of new instruments sounds with entirely different sample sets into the MOXF, which cannot be done on the FA (or any other board in this price range). Outside of a handful of SuperNatural acoustic tones, the only sampled instruments available on the FA are those from the XV-5080 sound set (circa 2000) and up to two downloadable SRX card sets (not all that much newer)... which isn't to say they are bad, but they are not state of the art, and you can't add new ones. Another way to look at it is that the "rompler" section of the FA is 64 mb; if you load up the two virtual SRX slots, you're up to 192 mb. The MOXF is 741 mb, and you can add a card and more downloadable sounds (or create your own) for an additional 1024 mb, for a total of up to 1765 mb of wave data, 9 times more than on the FA. Size isn't everything, but it's not totally irrelevant, either. (Though to be fair, the Roland figure doesn't include the new SuperNatural piano, EPs, clav, basses, acoustic guitar, or ensemble strings, nor the aforementioned clonewheel and VA synth, nor the memory for the samples you can trigger from the pads.) Also, both boards have 16 insert effects... the MOXF arranges them as eight pairs of two. There is no clear winner there. Yes, the FA lets you have sounds on 16 sounds at a time, but only one effect per sound; the MOXF only lets you put effects on 8 sounds at a time, but you can put two effects on each sound (plus some global effects like reverb, on either board). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members dan88z Posted March 31, 2014 Members Share Posted March 31, 2014 Many of the Yamaha's sounds have been recycled from the original Motif that came out in 2001, so they aren't too new either. My XS has many of the the same sounds my ES had, which were the same my friend's original Motif had. There are changes to the architecture between the XS and ES, but a lot of the sounds don't use that change (8 parts per tone vs 4). The main thing that gets upgraded between versions is the acoustic piano sound, but the other bread and butter stuff is largely the same, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members AnotherScott Posted March 31, 2014 Members Share Posted March 31, 2014 Dan, you're correct that newer Yamahas include many legacy Yamaha sounds, and that's a good thing... I actually wish they kept more, because sometimes an old Yamaha has a sound I like that I can't get on a newer one! So I'm not arguing against old sounds. But it's one thing to say that an instrument like the Yamaha includes many old sounds, you can't equate that with the fact that an instrument like the Roland has almost entirely old sounds. Outside of the handful of SN acoustic tones, ALL the sampled instruments in the FA are old. The 64 mb XV5080 stock sound set is 14 years old; the downloadable 128 mb worth of SRX expansions are also getting up there (and in fact, even include some older sounds, from the previous generation JV cards of the 90s). By comparison, here is the wave sample size of the different generations of Motif, and you can see how many new/different samples the newer models have (actually more than these figures imply, since sometimes old samples were removed). Motif: 84 mb (this one came out about a year after the 64 mb XV-5080)Motif ES: 175 mbMotif XS: 355 mbMotif XF: 741 mb (plus optional flash cards, for which Yamaha supplied another 480 mb of free content via the "Inspiration in a Flash" download, which included new samples and also restored some of the earlier Motif samples that people liked that had been removed from subsequent models) - MOXF is the same So it is obviously way off base to suggest that the 741 to 1200+ megabytes of wave data Yamaha supplies for the MOXF is basically the same as what was in the 84 megabyte Motif. Whereas the 64 to 192 mb of wave data Roland supplies for the FA are just what Roland was supplying on the XV-5080 and the SRX cards. There's nothing wrong with old sounds, and the FA has a lot of other great features to recommend it. But as a rompler, the Yamaha has a lot more and a lot newer sound data, and (with the optional flash card) the ability to continue to load new sounds into it. But sure, if the FA has the sounds you care about, and you like them, then the rest could be academic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members dan88z Posted March 31, 2014 Members Share Posted March 31, 2014 I'm not suggesting that the only samples in the newer Yamahas is what was in the old ones- only that those sounds are ported over from version to version, just like Roland has ported their main sound set from board to board. The Fantom G8 has 256mb of waveforms so it's not just the original 64mb of XV data loaded in there. It'd be interesting to see what new samples are actually in the Yamaha to make up that larger ROM. I know the main difference between my ES and XS was the addition of key off type samples on the pianos, string resonance stuff, and the articulation type sounds for strings. There are probably other things like drums that I don't use. I imagine that Roland has a new high end workstation in the works to compete with Yamaha and the other manufacturers that will be based on the SN/Integra soundset and have more features than the FA series has The SN sounds are a huge part of Roland's design now, and who knows how much memory they have allocated to them, but it's probably similar to what the XF series have. There are almost 500 SN waveforms and 1200 pcm waveforms in the FA, and that's not counting any of the drums. There are 700+ pcm drums. My XS has 2900 or so wave forms including drums. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members AnotherScott Posted March 31, 2014 Members Share Posted March 31, 2014 It'd be interesting to see what new samples are actually in the Yamaha to make up that larger ROM. For each Motif/MOX model, you can download the Data List from Yamaha's web site, and see a complete waveform list. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members keybdwizrd Posted April 1, 2014 Members Share Posted April 1, 2014 The topic isn't important enough to me to go compare waveform lists, but it does does seem as though I remember a fair number of patches in my MOX from the original Motif that I used to have. Maybe some of them are just similar, and my aged memory isn't working perfectly. Given the FA's ability to have an insert effect for each of the 16 channels, when individual sounds are loaded into a studio set, do they sound exactly as they do when in single mode? Or, does a sound get more than one insert effect when in single mode, but only one when loaded into a studio set? I know I have discussed this before, but ideally I want a keyboard whereby when I listen to sounds in single mode, they sound exactly they same when loaded into 16-part mode. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RockPianoman Posted April 2, 2014 Members Share Posted April 2, 2014 Hopefully they have the original effects.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members N.Cassidy Posted May 4, 2014 Members Share Posted May 4, 2014 This is is just the discussion I was after! Am weighing up fa08 and moxf8. I live near a big music shop with good prices but they are definitely Roland biased. Yamahas and Korgs get put on higher shelves! I use a keyboard for classical compositions. Also have become more involved in musicals (directing and keys 1) so am very interested in the quality of the sound sets. Would value opinions as to the quality of the instruments side by side, particularly the piano, strings orchestral instruments. Have heard both keyboards but don't have enough time before buying to compare all the sounds. Listened to the YouTube fa/Artis/moxf comparison of the piano and actually thought the ambience of the Yamaha had an edge - was this the sound or the effects settings? Also expandability. The Roland site has free sound sets to download, I understand the Yamaha is not free? Both seem to have useful DAW features. I used to have a Roland RD300 (second version) but have never owned a Yamaha of any type. Anyone have an opinion of the quality of the orchestral sounds on each? Also, currently using mainstage3 and controller for musicals. The last I played in had about 150 patch changes. If I do this with hardware is it possible to programme that many patches for live use and trigger them via a pedal on either machine? I was shown the Roland patches being triggered via the sample pads but don't know how easy it would be to change between sound sets live? The music shop said that the Roland pianos were better ad Yamaha only sample from their own instruments. Apologies for lack of knowledge!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members AnotherScott Posted May 4, 2014 Members Share Posted May 4, 2014 The Roland site has free sound sets to download' date=' I understand the Yamaha is not free? [/quote'] THere are both free and paid software libraries for MOXF. Go to http://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/keyboards/synthesizers/sy-moxf/moxf8/ and select the "Additional Sample Library" tab. Basically, Yamaha offers a bunch of free ones, and third parties offer a lot of packages for sale. Yamaha's free "Inspiration in a Flash" download alone provides about 500 mb of new sounds. However, you do you have to purchase the optional flash card in order to have the room to load them in. It is true that Yamaha only samples Yamaha pianos, however there are third party downloads you ca purchase and load in if you prefer the sound of a non-Yamaha grand. I don't think this is a crucial distinction though. When you buy a grand piano, you get only one piano sound. ;-) Or to put it differently, I'd rather have one piano sound I really liked, than three different-brand piano sounds, none of which sounded as good as the one. Roland's SuperNatural pianos (a hybrid of sampling and modeling) do have a different sound than Yamaha's sampled pianos, and which is better is a matter of opinion. Unfortunately, though, while there are many piano sounds you can load into the MOXF, you typically can't try out those alternate pianos in a store. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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