Roland Forum • Re: Roland GO:KEYS 3 vs Controller with Roland Cloud?

Is it multitimbral? I didn't see that in the spec list directly. CK can play 3 at once but it's a lot more expensive & probably more controls.

GO can play 2 sounds at once.

If it's as good as advertised for almost free I pose the same question I did with the SeqTrak Yamaha released.

Why shoot yourself in the foot and undermine your high end gear and make available very affordable offerings that sound as good as a Fantom etc....There has to be a logical catch to risk sales to your main line gear. OR we're getting ripped off on the main line gear that is realistically only worth half of what they are charging us.

This is nowhere remotely near what a Fantom is. It has a very small subset of its sounds and an even smaller subset of its functionality.

IF profit is in the $350 price and the dealer gets a cut this this was made for what $175 and then you have to box and ship it too.

If it sells for $350, raw cost would probably be well under $100. A rough estimate would be that build cost is typically about one fifth of retail, maybe more like a quarter for low cost, high volume items, and probably a lower percentage for high cost, lower volume (or "boutique") items. But besides boxing/shipping, there's also other overhead like warehousing, administration, customer support, import duties, initial fabrication and R&D costs to amortize, warranty service to cover, and then of course profit for Roland, profit for the distribution arm in your country, profit for the dealer.

The manufacturing cost would be a lot less than $175.00. That would be the price a retailer would normally buy at from the manufacturer.

I agree about the first part, but my understanding is that an item that sells for $350 typically costs the dealer about $250.

If it's reliable one could attach the SeqTrak to the GO KEYS and do about anything I guess and never need to buy a flagship synth having the best of both Roland and Yamaha for pennies.

With the Roland lacking 5-pin MIDI, I'm not sure you could directly connect it to the seqtrak.

With Roland lacking MIDI controller functionality, it would also not be adept at selecting seqtrak sounds, you'd have to select them as needed from the seqtrak, which looks pretty painful.

At any rate, these are not the flagship sounds of these companies (even if some of these sounds are also in the flagship). Certainly in the case of comparing the Go to a Fantom. The seqtrak might fare a little better, but is still well shy of the sonic capabilities of a Montage M.

But really, if all you want is "the best sounds for the buck," and it's not for gigging, software will beat it. As Saul says, you can get these sounds (and may more) from Zenology, but then you can also add a whole bunch of other sounds besides what's available in zenology, too. So I don't think "the sounds" is the reason to buy the Go, it has to be the whole package... feel, functionality.. and these are (usually) where a lot of the value of higher priced boards comes from, not just the sounds.

First time in many, many years I’ve seen this quality for so low.

I haven't played the GO so can't compare, but I was very impressed with the Casio CT-S500 for the money. (Which, BTW, does three sounds at a time, to get back to the first question of this post... and also feels more playable for piano than that CK61, though the CK61 has a lot of advantages of its own as well.)

Statistics: Posted by anotherscott — Fri May 24, 2024 4:29 am

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