Buy or not buy an Yamaha EX5

[tand]

Hi there guys.

I already have an Korg Kronos. 4 years with me by now.

So, I've found a guy selling an Yamaha EX5, in great conditions. He is asking $450 for it.

Do you folks think it worths once I've already have the kronos?

Will it add much value to Kronos or I can do many of it with my Kronos?

What would be your decision in that situation?

Thank you guys!

[leonh]

I had one very long time ago very good for its time I guess you are like most of us who get bored with Kronos perfection and all the time looking for something interesting so why not if you can extra keyboard cant harm.

[aellison62]

$450 is a pretty good price for that. The EX -5 has an AN card in it, I think. That is Yamaha’s analog modeling tech that sounds very nice. From the AN1X. For that price, I would probably pick it up as long as everything works.

[19naia]

One thing Kronos needs more of is polyphony.
Kronos does not have enough polyphony to handle all it can do.

Every time you add to Kronos an external synth with its own osccilators or tone generators, you add to Kronos polyphony.

And... Kronos is built to interface with other synths that have midi connectivity.

I doubt you can pay $450 extra on a comparable workstation and get the kind of total Polyphony that Kronos plus $450 Y-EX5 will provide.

It is really just a matter of: if you like the sound that the EX5 provides.

If it has editable arpeggiators, then that may be useful over kronos. Lots of people talk about wanting kronos to have an old fashioned arpeggiator with user arpeggios that edit.
An extra 16tracks of sequencer is also useful.

[Derek Cook]

Hi

The EX5 was may main lower board for a long time (1999!), although I have recently replaced it with a Montage 7 - but I had to get an EX5R for the studio before I could sell the keyboard.

I ran the EX5 and Kronos X61 (top board) together for about three years. They do complement each other well.

With the EX5 you get probably one of the best AWM2 engines in terms of programmability (the Motif was a step backwards).

You then have the AN engine, which is based on the AN1x, but not an AN1x if you get what I mean. You could do dual layer mono voices or single layer duo voices, so best considered for leads not pads.

There is then the VL engine, essentially a VL70m. The EX5 has 16 slots for custom VL elements as a bonus ( The VL70m/PLG150-VL only have 6).

And then you have the secret sauce of the EX5: Fomulated Digital Signal Processing (FDSP) on the AWM engine. It cuts polyphony down to 16 voices, but it sounds awesome. It is a note/velocity independent effects processor, acting on each note separately. It has models for EP and Electric guitar pick ups, which is why the EX5 EPs and guitars sound so good, but it has more tricks up its sleeve, like PWM, self FM and then phasing and flanging - think about being able to phase and flange each note separately based on dynamics.

Downsides of EX5 is it does not have enough processor horsepower in performance mode to have multiple FDSP/AN/VL voices. You are limited to one, and that cuts the available insert effect slots on parts, usually four, down to one. But you learn to live with that.

I used to help run EX5Tech.com, which has been down for a while, but myself and a friend have a sister site up at EX5Tech.co.uk which has a smorgasbord of free patches for the EX5 - the EX5 community where very prolific and generous.

If you want to hear the range and power of the EX5, there are free songs over on www.marce-music.com. MarcE was a generous and excellent EX5 programmer, who became very ill, so organised a musical tribute to him for three or four years in the early 2000’s. The music had to feature his EX5 patches, and the contributions were diverse and astounding.

$450 is a good price for an EX5. Even better if has the SCSI card for adding external mass storage for larger samples, and FLASH memory (Up to 16MB). You can still buy FLASH, but the SCSI card is very rare. Although you can buy an A3000 cheaply and get the SCSI card from that. Another thing to watch is that the EX5 PSU is a unique design (switched mode - uurrghhh) and Yamaha no longer repair them. But the A3000 uses the same PSU so you can find “donor spares”

Is there overlap between an EX5 and Kronos? In my opinion not really. They are both very powerful machines with different sonic characters.

Hope that helps!

[tand]

Thank you guys for all help.

At the end, I quitted the negotiation and decided not to buy. The seller changed the price and was asking $800 and I thought that was too much.

[Derek Cook]

Yes, $800 is too much in my opinion. The only way I would consider $800 was for an absolutely mint condition example fully loaded with SCSI, FLASH, RAM, DIGITAL IO and external mass storage thrown in.

Don’t rule one out in future if you can get one for a good price. It is an amazing machine (a bit of a.flawed diamond, but sonically amazing). So much so that when it came to sell my EX5 boards I could not contemplate life without an EX5, so had been keeping 4U of space for the time when I could find an EX5R. They do not come up for sale often, but I finally managed to get a good one last year!

[tand]

It was in mint condition, but not loaded with SCSI, FLASH, RAM, DIGITAL IO and external mass storage.

Derek, when you say sonically amazing, what do you mean? I loved the EPs, really beauitiful EPs, but as far as I know they can't be sampled like the orignal because of FDSP.

[Derek Cook]

Yeah, $800 for mint vanilla is too much.

You are correct with the EPs. If you listen to an EX5 AWM only EP compared to the same Waves (collection of keymapped samples) ran through the FDSP engine, the difference is astounding. The FDSP EP model is processing the basic Rhodes or Wurlie Waves (or any sample you like for that matter) and adapting the sample according to its EP model and how you have set it up. Ski from EX5Tech created a patch catch SkiRhodes and that was even better than the presets. So you get the dynamics of the Rhodes, including the growl and bark when you dig harder. I managed to fool a guitar player in one of my earlier bands where I did a bit of FDSP rhythm guitar for one song, and got the guitar into howling feedback at the end of the song, and he was twiddling for ages on his guitar trying to stop it!

So you get a level of dynamism in real time that will be lost if you sample it. FDSP breathes life into static Waves that really bring the EX5 to life. It has a deserved reputation as a pad monster, as ably demonstrated by MarcE and his programming. Of course not all patches are FDSP, there are plenty of great “vanilla” AWM ones as well or combinations of AWM, VL, FDSP.

You could add your own samples of course. We had a collection of Mellotron Samples, which sounded amazing given that all the Waves were squeezed to fit into 16MB of FLASH memory.

The stupid things about the EX5 - I am convinced that Yamaha have a “stupid quirks” department that all of their products mus pass through before release.

• The DSP limitations in Performance Mode as mentioned above
• You can only play two performance parts from the keyboard!! Unless you route the MIDI out of the EX5 and back into it.
• SCSI transfer rate is crippingly slow, which is why FLASH is a must
• Bugs in its SYSEX implementation that were never fixed that could corrupt your data, despite people like myself providing well qualified bug reports. Indeed Yamaha denied the EX5 even having a SYSEX implementation, which was patently absurd as it does! Later manuals removed the SYSEX info, but it is still there. Savvy librarians like my ex.factory librarian can work around the bugs.

Despite those issues, I would not be without the “Blue Beast”. As much as I love my Kronos, there is something about the Yamaha sound that I cannot be without. And as we all probably know, there is no such thing as a perfect keyboard.

As I mentioned above, do check out the MarcE tribute songs if you want an idea of the depth and diversity of the EX5. MarcE was a master programmer who wrung so much out the machine, and all of his collections are free.

[tand]

Wow. Thanks for this great class Derek.

I was about to buy it just because the EPs man. But, I realized $800 was a to much for just EPs

I'm fascinated for that sounds pianos. But what let me down was the limitations, the polyphony of AN, 2 notes I think, so, cant use that for pads. Or the sampler size. If at least the polyphony of AN was 8 notes, you could do huge things with mixing AN with FDSP.

With that limitations in mind, I think $800 is really too much.

Unfortunately I don't think Yamaha will come with a new project based on the EX5.

They will sell more to the masses with just sample based keyboards.

[Derek Cook]

Indeed, and that is why I jumped ship and purchased a Kronos as i got fed up of waiting for Yamaha to do a modern day EX5 with multiple sound engines.

The theory is that Yamaha got badly burnt on the EX5 due to a combination of a great concept, but flawed as the available DSP horsepower of the day was not quite up to the concept (esp in performance mode) and it occurred at the time when the Internet was taking off, so it allowed Yamaha to be publicly flamed for getting it so wrong. At same time, the AN1x was a good success (still one if the best VAs IMO) but the FS1r was another failure. Who wanted 8 op FM via a tortuous interface? Around the same time you had the VL70m and VL1. This was the last time that Yamaha was adventurous, but I guess the bottom line was that they did not get the payback in the investment and R&D

So the result was the Motif Range that Yamaha milked for a long time. Very nice sounding (I have a Motif Rack ES inc PLG150-AN and PLG150-VL) that sounds nice, but pretty boring to program.

When the 40th Anniversary synth for Yamaha in 2014 was a Motif XF in a white paint job, I gave up and purchased a Kronos X

And now we have the Montage. I was terribly disappointed when that did not include an AN type engine, but at least FM is back, and to me the machine is very SY like in that it can sound very analog, which might justify why they did not have an AN engine in it. Even OSC sync sounds are good (not excellent).

But I still love the EX5 and learnt a long time ago ho to live with and get around its faults).

[GregC]

Just a crazy thought. If we show less enthusiasm for old gear, the 'capitalist sellers' will figure it out, and prices will decline

[JFree]

I have a mint EX5R, no scsi if anyone's interested.

[Derek Cook]

Just a crazy thought. If we show less enthusiasm for old gear, the 'capitalist sellers' will figure it out, and prices will decline

Well it should work if nobody is prepared to buy at the price it is being offered at. I always say however that value is in the eyes of the beholder. What is a good price to me may not be to the next person. As a South Paw guitar player, I was prepared to pay quite a high price on a Leftie Variax 500 when it came up on eBay a few years back. It had high value to me due to its rarity, if you see what I mean.

[shefu]

Yeah, $800 for mint vanilla is too much.

You are correct with the EPs. If you listen to an EX5 AWM only EP compared to the same Waves (collection of keymapped samples) ran through the FDSP engine, the difference is astounding. The FDSP EP model is processing the basic Rhodes or Wurlie Waves (or any sample you like for that matter) and adapting the sample according to its EP model and how you have set it up. Ski from EX5Tech created a patch catch SkiRhodes and that was even better than the presets. So you get the dynamics of the Rhodes, including the growl and bark when you dig harder. I managed to fool a guitar player in one of my earlier bands where I did a bit of FDSP rhythm guitar for one song, and got the guitar into howling feedback at the end of the song, and he was twiddling for ages on his guitar trying to stop it!

So you get a level of dynamism in real time that will be lost if you sample it. FDSP breathes life into static Waves that really bring the EX5 to life. It has a deserved reputation as a pad monster, as ably demonstrated by MarcE and his programming. Of course not all patches are FDSP, there are plenty of great “vanilla” AWM ones as well or combinations of AWM, VL, FDSP.

You could add your own samples of course. We had a collection of Mellotron Samples, which sounded amazing given that all the Waves were squeezed to fit into 16MB of FLASH memory.

The stupid things about the EX5 - I am convinced that Yamaha have a “stupid quirks” department that all of their products mus pass through before release.

• The DSP limitations in Performance Mode as mentioned above
• You can only play two performance parts from the keyboard!! Unless you route the MIDI out of the EX5 and back into it.
• SCSI transfer rate is crippingly slow, which is why FLASH is a must
• Bugs in its SYSEX implementation that were never fixed that could corrupt your data, despite people like myself providing well qualified bug reports. Indeed Yamaha denied the EX5 even having a SYSEX implementation, which was patently absurd as it does! Later manuals removed the SYSEX info, but it is still there. Savvy librarians like my ex.factory librarian can work around the bugs.

Despite those issues, I would not be without the “Blue Beast”. As much as I love my Kronos, there is something about the Yamaha sound that I cannot be without. And as we all probably know, there is no such thing as a perfect keyboard.

As I mentioned above, do check out the MarcE tribute songs if you want an idea of the depth and diversity of the EX5. MarcE was a master programmer who wrung so much out the machine, and all of his collections are free.

I just stumbled across this thread while searching what a fair price for a EX5 would be today, since I'm about to make an offer on one being sold locally.

First of all I would like to thank you for the wealth of knowledge on the EX5 man, it's been a very interesting read especially from someone so involved in the synth as you. So thank you for that.

What would you say is a fair price for an EX5 today, in 2023 is? The seller is asking for $800. As far as I know it has no upgrades and it's in good condition, but not mint. I was going to offer $500. What do you think?