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I bought one of these when they first came out, and still have it. At first I loved it, but over time I found more and more subtle (but in many cases serious) problems with it.
The lack of the promised hard drive is #1 on my list. It was one of the reasons I bought it, but no hard drive from Yamaha ever became available in the US market. However, there are options: a 350MB Hitachi laptop (2.5") drive should work if you could obtain the proper cable for it (the IDE interface is on the main digital board, and you would need a cable about 12 to 18" long, but since laptop drives use a very condensed version of the IDE connector for space reasons, and since most laptops don't have their hard drives anywhere NEAR 12" away from their motherboard IDE connectors (for reasons which should be rather screamingly obvious), such cables have proven to be EXTREMELY hard to come by.
#2 is the fact that there is NO WAY to get MIDI Out from a sequence playing from the floppy drive. This may have been deliberate, for "copy protection" of Yamaha's precious Disk Orchestra Collection and DiskClavier disk library (both of which play fine on the 7000), but we should at least be able to do this for our own songs in GM format! I have a Digitech Vocalist Workstation which I use for harmony (the PSR-8000 and up have a stripped-down version of this built-in), and while I can make it follow chords etc. using the 7000's MIDI, I cannot do pre-programmed harmony tracks from MIDI files playing on the 7000's floppy drive! This cripples much of what I wanted to do with it!
Other niggling problems include the fact that the Lead voice, when played along with Right 1 or 2 and full right-handed chords, will trigger in Top Note Priority mode even if no NEW note has been pressed. This means that if you're holding down E and G above middle C and also the High C above middle C, with a prominent percussive voice on Lead and a soft pad voice on Right 1, the pad voice will as expected play on all three notes and the Lead voice will play only on the High C. Now if you release the C and play the D above it but there is a gap between the releasing of the C and the playing of the D (perhaps a rest in the melody line), the Lead voice will NOT be silent between the two: instead it will drop down and play the G note, as if you had re-pressed the G key! This sounds AWFUL! The Lead should have been set up to trigger a new note ONLY if you actually PLAY a new note!
All in all, the 7000 was good for its time, but time has passed it by. It and its little brother the 4000, along with the Clavinova CVP units of that year, all used a protype version of Yamaha's then-new XG extension to General MIDI. The full XG spec is much more extensive, and moreover, the voice list of the "proto-XG" used in the 7000 is INCOMPATIBLE with true XG: if you play an XG file on a 7000, you will get some XG effects such as parametrically controlled reverb, chorus, etc., but you will NOT get any of the additional XG instrument sounds over GM, even though the 7000 has over 300 voices of its own that go beyond the 128 offered by GM! The PSR-8000, 9000, and 9000 Pro, and all subsequent Clavinova CVPs, etc., all use real XG and carry the XG logo.
The 9000pro's best feature is the ability to accept up to two PLG cards. These are Yamaha's own expansion cards that can work in a variety of their higher-end gear. Unlike voice expansion cards for Roland and other instruments that merely add new wave samples and sounds, the PLG cards add whole new synth and/or effects ENGINES! This means more POLYPHONY, and ways of making sound that go beyond merely playing back digital sampled recordings from a wavetable! There are PLG cards that do vocal harmony (PLG-150VH), FM synthesis emulating the classic Yamaha DX-7 (PLG-150DX), analog modelled synthesis emulating a Yamaha AN1X which in turn emulates the classic Prophet 5 (PLG-150AN), etc., plus two wavetable modules that add polyphony and sounds (one to add XG to PLG-host devices that don't come with the XG sound set such as the S-80 performance digital piano, and one to add a library of awesome piano sounds and polyphony to any PLG-capable device), but my favorite is the physical modelling synth card that emulates the Yamaha VL-70m (PLG-150VL). This one produces absolutely stunning brass, reed, and other wind, plus string (bowed or plucked), and truly wild synth and SFX sounds. It can only play one note at a time, but what a note! If you have Windows Media Player 6.4 or later, you can hear an example I tweaked up from a demo MIDI file I found on NTonyX's Web site, to sound its best on my $15 Yamaha YMF-724-based sound card that itself has Level 1 XG plus VL! Play this file I digitally reocrded directly from the MIDI of my sound card, using its own audio loopback: "http://www.shreve.net/~joelrea/AnotherWoman.asf" (the upper-case IS significant!). When you've heard that, you will probably not believe it's really MIDI, so just to prove that it is: "http://www.shreve.net/~joelrea/AnotherWoman.mid". Both are about 5 minutes and 40 seconds long, with the .ASF being about 4.8MB and the .MID being only 86kB. The MIDI version won't sound as good as the .ASF unless you have MIDI equipment or software (Yamaha S-YXG100plus 1.0 running on a GENUINE Intel Pentium II, Celeron, or better CPU -- the VL module WILL NOT INSTALL on any AMD or Cyrix CPU, even one powerful enough to handle it!) that can do Level 1 or better XG plus VL. Anyway, the tenor sax is VL, as is the short cornet-like trumpet solo about 2/3 of the way through the song. Everything else is Level 1 XG wavetable.
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