Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Yamaha prepping to jump ahead of Kronos hardware?

Caught this in-the-know article recently...

Yamaha designs new mainboard around new processor for their high-end keyboards.

In a nutshell we should be a bit excited about this. It means Yamaha is taking a jump ahead of Kronos - at least as far as the innards go. Single chip solution to sample streaming to reduce cost of course, but also power consumption. It has the SH4 processor in there with the memory interfaces, they're not dependent on complex power hungry PC parts. In the end we'll see quicker boot times and no fans, vs. Kronos. And it doesn't need all the pieces a regular SSD has. It just connects directly to the flash chips, so you don't need more OS like disk interfaces. Once the hardware is in place, then it's up to Yamaha to deliver the fantastic sample libraries and synth engines etc. we are waiting for.

This could be the basis for a new generation of Motifs (or whatever they name their next-generation workstation) - and if they use the hardware design across their line - we could see it in some nice digital pianos with the big sample libraries we've been pining for.

I was the first one in France (Yes it is !... ) to have the Motif XS 7... And it was 8 years ago !!... Before this, I was on Korg Synth since the M1... And 01W/FD, T3, Triton...

It is time to wake up Yamaha !...

It's a good news !...

It sounds nice in theory, but I wonder what it'll do to price and upgradability, hence actual sample storage space at a given price point, over the approach of using commodity parts. The Tyros was somewhat notorious for the high price of extra RAM, and it sounds like with this new chip you'll have to spend megabucks on Yamaha custom expansion boards, rather than simply inserting a cheap SD card. Perhaps that's what they want. SD cards are plenty fast enough these days, so there is a whiff of over-engineering about this. Maybe if there's a decent amount of soldered-in flash memory (like 256 GB) with a lot of it free for 3rd party libraries, then upgrading will be a non-issue.

i think its wrong direction, they should focus in software with general pc parts (like kronos running on intel atom cpu) instead of hardware.

today, the hardware prices and the ssds much affordable, there is no reason to invent the wheel.

Unless that wheel is expensive and makes it difficult to be profitable and competitive in the market. Or if that wheel has slow boot times and requires fans for cooling - both of which give the Kronos a PC in a keyboard feel rather than an "instrument". I think the Kronos sounds great and is the most powerful workstation in its price range ever. But its design does have a few short comings.

In the end, the insides only matter to the extent that we can afford the instrument, it sounds great, has the right feature set and is easy to use (and of course on this forum has a great action). NAMM 2016 is coming up. Would be really cool to see if Yamaha has something ready to go.

FWIW, in the article referenced about this, the author looks at the tech specs of this and concludes that one of the benefits is likely to be "the demise of the expensive expansion flash DIMMs"


Curious... on a Mac or PC, have you ever tried to stream a multi-gig piano off an SD card? Does it require USB 3.0 to get the necessary throughput?

I've run Vintage D (briefly) off a USB 2 thumb drive, and it didn't seem to cause any problems in operation, other than the initial load time being slower compared to internal SSD. I didn't test it extensively.

USB 2 does tend to slow down external drives compared to USB 3 since the real-world transfer rates of the former are about 20 MB/s, if I remember correctly. This page shows SD card random read test speeds around 70-80 MB/s. That's enough for over 400 simultaneous stereo CD quality audio streams.

I think this might differ between products depending on if the software streams direct from disk or loads samples into RAM. Also. How low you expect latency to be as a performer.

Don't they *all* work by loading the first part of the samples into a RAM buffer then streaming the rest as required? I don't think you could make a software piano with acceptable latency otherwise.

With the start of the samples in RAM, latency is not affected by the read speeds or access times of the storage. They only affect the level of polyphony, and initial loading time. With a faster drive, not only does it load the buffer more quickly, but also reduces the size of buffer required. So load time is speeded up quadratically.

Maybe this Yamaha thing is all about speeding up access so much that only minimal buffering is required, so multiple instruments can be switched between quickly, and used simultaneously without excessive RAM requirements. Even then, though, if an SD card isn't fast enough, you can get off the shelf things like M.2 SSDs over SATA which run at 550 MB/s, and aren't overly expensive ($108 for 250 GB). Or PCI Express ones that are more expensive but even faster (around $190 for 256 GB with 2000-4000 MB/s).

The Kurzweil is unique in that it does NOT use/need any sample pre-load, whilst using relatively cheap NAND FLASH.

Greg.