Hello everyone,
I promised to have a compact review about the S975 once I have received it, and guess what? I have received it on Monday finally.
I was upgrading from S910 so the jump is HUGE!
About a month ago I visited Guitar Center in Pasadena, CA and got me an S970 knowing that I can return it within 45 days. I wanted to have a feel for the general board and also I wanted to try some of the features that I never had in the S910, like Expansion Memory, Audio Styles, the Assignable knobs, the better and bigger LCD, etc.
In all honesty, I did not enjoy the experience of trying out the S970 for those reasons:
1. Boomy Sound no matter what I do to the EQ settings and I tried all forum user's recommendations, liked non - Sorry fellas!
2. EQ Configuration is still not as simple as the S910 which takes forever to adjust.
3. Keys feel noisy and clicky, in other words, feels "Cheap" with very little cushioning.
Before getting the S970 from Guitar Center the sales guys over there convinced me to give the KORG Pa1000 a shot, man this board looked and felt fantastic and the Keys feel were definitely phenomenal, compared with the S970, but I could not stand it for more than 48 hours, the styles are a Joke and the interface is crazy and very limiting. Voices other than ensembles and guitars are mediocre. Anyways, that is a story for another time.
Now, to the enhancements that I can see and feel in the S975:
1. Keys feel and noise - Completely different animal - feels very premium, balanced, without ANY noise
2. Speakers....... Out of the box experience was NOT Boomy and of course, being released 3 years after the S970, one would imagine that
Yamaha took those little fixes that everyone hoped for, and maybe sourcing the hardware was from different vendors too, So to recap on that, its totally different experience (Built-in Speakers), tuned, balanced and natural.
3. Build Quality - here is the not so good news, at least from my perspective: Yamaha changed the workstation color from the classy dark gray to Matte Black, some people will like this, but I for one, don't.
4. Overall system speed is enhanced, formatting Expansion memory takes about 5 seconds, and Pack installation is about 1/3 the time required on the S970. This is so good news because I play with those packs a lot, and it was very frustrating on the S970.
5. The (S-PLUS) is not consuming some part of the 768MB, hence, We have 768MB to play around with. This is pathetic move from Yamaha in 2018, should have been at least 2 GB. The Styles Section memory is still capped at 13MB like in the S970 so you can install more packs but you have to cut the numbers of the "Styles" from those packs combined. I hope you know what I mean.
Overall, I Love it, feels like home, again! I tried my tremendous Styles, Voices collection and all is sweet. One more thing is that the in-built Styles felt a bit brushed with the new Drum Kits, not as synthetic and toyish as they were on the S970. I like that a lot!
That's it for now, I will edit this post in the future if I feel that I need to add to it.
Feel free to ask me anything!
Will