Pa5x First Impressions: (I'm not starting a new thread for this on a Yamaha forum)
Our 1st customer's unit arrived and my impressions (only had 15 minutes of play time before he was done asking me how to navigate it)
The physical casing is typical, beautiful Korg. Yes, Yamaha focuses more on sound and less on aesthetics, but let's not kid ourselves, physically, the PA5x is gorgeous. Brushed black aluminum casing with dark wood sides (It's a slightly odd design choice; why not make it all black brushed aluminum? They actually do that so if you chip or dent you can just sand it out. Visually still odd, but consistent with all their Kronos/Krome /Nautilus designs as well).
Ease of use out of box: what you'd expect, just as easy to navigate as a Genos for just selecting styles and voices. None of the difficulty of either OS really shows up until you try to get into intricate editing.
Sound: the electric guitars sound amazing, really benefitting from actual guitar amp modelling on board. The drums sound phenomenal. The stereo imaging of most of the styles was also fantastic; a really wide audio image. With some notable exceptions: the brilliant 12-8 Movie Soundtrack style (designed for Pirates of the Caribbean, which is what I converted to Yamaha for my long pirates medley on YouTube) while the drums sound great, all the orchestral horns sounds are weak and sound rather monaural rather than stereo (same was true on the Pa4x for the same style), but at least the strings were better than their previous gen (those were new with the PA4x equivalent of the Genos Superior pack, they added spiccato strings on par with T4/T5).
Control: as with the PA4x, the S.Art 2 sounds are bizarre; as I'd mentioned before on Yamaha, S.Art2 automatically switches between mono and polyphonic to join things like glissandos, sampled pitch bends, etc. With the Pa4x, you had to manually stop a note going into a glissando or both saxes would sound; it's always in poly mode. That remains with the Pa5x. likewise, so do the other articulation idiosyncrasies, like needing to hold down notes on the right hand while slapping the joystick down for string slap/body tap.
That's all I had time to dig into. Oh, and I love the piano. It wasn't as crisp and clear as the Genos, but it was warm, and was never too bright (I mainly tried the 1st one, the Austrian grand I think it was. the 2nd piano, meant to be a Steinway I think, I only tried briefly). But the piano was impressive.
The built in styles were very modern and up to date, the Weeknd clearly being one of their favourite artists to base styles on (and those are *great* styles). On the other hand, the Country ones sounded a tad anemic to me; in particular the "Country Rock" style sounded more like dueling banjos to me. But if you're into modern pop/dance/r&b, the styles will be heaven for you. Likewise, those who like to noodle around with electric guitars on rock styles; some of those sounded *real* to me. Like it sounded like I had a couple of actual guitars playing power chords and strums in the background.
Mark