[HN Gopher] Yamaha PSR-60 Portasound
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Yamaha PSR-60 Portasound
        
       Author : omnibrain
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2021-07-02 16:19 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (archive.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
        
       | darig wrote:
       | Sound crackly and distorted to me
        
       | wazoox wrote:
       | Amusingly, there's one real PSR-60 that someone abandoned in the
       | trash shed in my residence. It's been there for a week, I think
       | I'll grab it and see if something still works in there.
        
         | tartoran wrote:
         | Take it! Even if it has issues , if you restore it you could
         | resell it for nice money.
        
           | tweetle_beetle wrote:
           | The market for discontinued hardware has become frankly
           | ridiculous in the last ten or fifteen years. Budget models in
           | ok condition which never even had much of a cult status are
           | selling for many times what they originally cost.
        
             | [deleted]
        
       | klodolph wrote:
       | The PSR line has always been great.
       | 
       | A couple years ago, Yamaha released the PSS-A50, PSS-F30, and
       | PSS-E30. They're three-octave keyboards with smaller keys...
       | something that Yamaha hasn't had in their product lineup for a
       | while. They compete with other miniature keyboards like the Casio
       | SA-46, Alesis Melody 32, or other low-end keyboards.
       | 
       | What I like about the PSS-A50 is that it makes it easy to grab a
       | keyboard, go somewhere, and make music. The sounds are
       | respectable and the key action is the same as the higher-end
       | miniature keyboards like the Yamaha Reface series (and I've
       | always liked Yamaha keyboard action). You can play the PSS-A50 by
       | itself, or you can plug it into a computer, and it runs off AA
       | batteries. The "low battery" indicator even works correctly with
       | rechargeable NiMH batteries.
       | 
       | The PSS series cost $100, which puts them above well above the
       | price of their competitors. But they're just so nice, and they
       | straddle the line really well between "make it fun to play" and
       | "make it useful for musicians".
        
       | tgv wrote:
       | Doesn't work well. It stutters on Firefox, and doesn't produce
       | sound on Safari and Chromium...
        
       | megameter wrote:
       | I often use plogue's Portasound VSTi for FM tones. It's actually
       | quite a bit more powerful than a real one since it can layer
       | sounds and do some additional modulation.
        
       | kstrauser wrote:
       | Wow! That was my very first non-piano keyboard.
       | 
       | A few years later, I begged my parents for a synthesizer. I
       | pictured a DX7, but on Christmas morning I opened a TX81Z and a
       | MIDI cable. Downside: _enormous_ learning curve. Upside: no one
       | told me that managing patches through the front menu, or learning
       | the basics of FM synthesis, was hard. I picked up an awful lot of
       | low-level technical information simply because I didn 't know I
       | couldn't.
        
         | danielrpa wrote:
         | That's hilarious. A TX81Z won't work without something to send
         | the MIDI data, so I suppose you already had a
         | controller/computer? Kudos to your parents for figuring out it
         | would work if that's the case, most parents aren't that
         | technical :).
        
           | kstrauser wrote:
           | Yeah, I had the PSR-60. It was an _alright_ MIDI controller,
           | except that it lacked velocity signals and only sent note-on,
           | note-off. I think they probably talked to a decent salesman
           | who listened to the situation and gave them a reasonable,
           | decently affordable solution.
           | 
           | I got an Amiga later and was very happy to use its MIDI to
           | drive everything.
        
             | ghusbands wrote:
             | Do you mean an Atari ST? The Amiga didn't have built-in
             | MIDI and the Atari did.
        
               | kstrauser wrote:
               | There were any number of $50 MIDI interfaces for the
               | Amiga, and I had one. The ST had it built in, which was
               | very cool, but they're not very complicated devices.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | What do they mean by "Scanner: Internet Archive Python library
       | 1.9.9"?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-07-03 23:02 UTC)