Users Forum

[FunkyWhiteBoy]

Lets create a new Owners Forum, and accumulate recommendations/opinions on all model keyboards from Users who actually owned them.
When new posts are created, a template should appear with the following sections:

• Manufacturer/Make e.g. Korg
• Model e.g. Kross
• Date Purchased
• Purchase Amount
• Date Sold
• Sold Amount
• Pro-things I liked
• Con-things I didn't like
• Other comments

And the posts should be searchable, e.g. "what keyboards can I buy for under $500", "What keyboards does Yamaha make", "show me all reviews on a Roland Juno"

This new forum could solve a lot of problems:

• New resource for the ever-so-common questions "what keyboard should I buy" or "which keyboard is better A vs B"
• Consolidates many of the scattered reviews that are all over this forum.
• Better info than the reviews on Retail sites, that never mention the "Cons" of a keyboard.
• Good place to research street price of a keyboard.

 

[Becky]

That's an interesting idea! So are you suggestion more of a user review section? I'm not sure if it would work in the main forum as such because it's less about discussion.

 

[happyrat1]

Sites like http://sweetwater.com and http://synthtopia.com already offer comprehensive historic customer reviews on practically every keyboard ever made.

Frankly I don't see the need to reinvent the wheel here in these forums for the sake of people who are too lazy to type a keyboard name and "review" into a Google search.

Bad enough half the tech questions around here are already no brainers that a simple search would solve in the first place.

Gary

 

[FunkyWhiteBoy]

yes, happyrat,
There are several sites with keyboard reviews, but they are all freeform. The value I'm proposing is have the reviews conform to the template

Secondly, several reviews are "hearsay", written by persons who never owned that keyboard. Asking when they purchased and for how much will reduce that.

Finally, of the dozen Kbd players I speak with regularly, whenever we purchased a new board, we all culled through the verbose rants and distilled it down to a few key points:

• Manufacturer/Make e.g. Korg
• Model e.g. Kross
• Date First Manufactured
• Date Discontinued
• List Price
• Street Price / date
• Pro-things Users liked
• Con-things Users didn't like

Our shopping would have been much simpler if that info had existed in this format to begin with.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

I think the idea has some merit, but suspect that it would be best for the data to be in some sort of database that can be displayed in various formats-- as a grid or spreadsheet showing the details of many keyboards all at once (either all keyboards in the database, or only those which meet specific criteria or filters), as a single page (for a single keyboard), etc. I'm not sure how easy it would be to design and implement something like that within a forum such as this one.

 

[happyrat1]

It's one thing to ask for a "Consumer Reports" of keyboard hardware and software.

It's a hell of a different thing to ask someone to create and maintain it.

What's to stop people from posting hearsay reviews here?

What happens to people who break the format? Who's going to police them and delete the posts?

Personally I've owned about 25 different keyboards over the past 20 years and I'm not going to spend 30 hours typing up reviews from memory for them all unless someone wants to know something specific about one in particular.

I seriously doubt anyone will ever need to know anything about a 1997 Realistic Concertmate or a dozen other obsolete boards that can only be found these days in attics and garage sales anyway.

And like I said, if you're willing to drop a thou or two on a keyboard and are too lazy to do your own google and youtube searches for reviews already online then why expect us to spoonfeed you the answers?

Caveat emptor is good advice for anyone buying a keyboard, a car or a house.

Type in any keyboard brand name and model and you'll get at least 50 Google hits on the first page. If you can't figure out which ones are the proper reviews from that lot then you really haven't put in any effort yourself.

Gary

 

[FunkyWhiteBoy]

Thanks for entertaining the idea, Becky and SeaGtGruff. Let us know if Keyboard Fourms has those resources to implement the necessary "database" structure.

 

[Becky]

I agree that it would be useful, it's certainly an interesting idea. However it could end up being a lot of work for something that may not be popular, so we'd need to be careful how much time we put in. We'll have a think about how it could work - one option might be tags within a specific forum section, another option would be a plug-in for the forum software.

We'll take a look, but don't hold your breath

 

[FunkyWhiteBoy]

NP, Becky, thanks for considering it.

 

[Fred Coulter]

Personally I've owned about 25 different keyboards over the past 20 years and I'm not going to spend 30 hours typing up reviews from memory for them all unless someone wants to know something specific about one in particular.

The other problem with reviewing old keyboards is that the context has changed.

Imagine, if you will, that you owned a DX7IIFD with the Grey Matter expansion card. You had a hot shit keyboard. It did FM synthesis on eight different channels simultaneously. It had a sixteen track sequencer. It was great. Lots of memory. You loved it, and couldn't live without it.

It also had only sixteen note polyphony. Total. Period.

The times have changed, and that really great keyboard is no longer so good. But in your memory, it still exists the way it was when you owned it.