A user review of the A800 pro
Apologies for the truly dreadful formatting of this message. For some reason I just CANNOT get paragraphs in there, even after re-editing the post. Well, recently my Novation Remote 61LE started behaving erratically, constantly sending random CCs and stuff over MIDI. It's probably just a bad cap which I can certainly fix but I always regretted buying it - the keyboard velocity response is just... weird... and you just can't get a smooth response no matter which curve you choose. It's cheap but nasty. So, time to buy a new 61 note controller keyboard. I already have a weighted 88 note master keyboard which is actually a Technics SX-P30 piano - which has no controls other than the keyboard - and a Korg X5D synth which has given many excellent years of service, but certainly doesn't have useful knobs and buttons, not to mention drawbars. Since this time I wasn't going to end up with another sucky keyboard, I looked carefully at the options and unfortunately they pretty much lead to only one choice, the A800. Not cheap, but certainly well built. So, having gotten it fairly integrated with the rest of the studio gear, some observations. THE GOOD The quality of the hardware is certainly excellent. The keyboard velocity response is smooth, the keys are nice, the buttons and knobs move smoothly and precisely. The 8 pads can send aftertouch individually and are velocity sensitive. Buttons light up when you press them. THE BAD The keyboard aftertouch requires fairly hefty pressure on the keys to activate it. It is, however, still playable and largely compensates for the spring-loaded modulation and pitch joystick - normally I disconnect the modulation axis spring and this is probably doable with some warranty-voiding disassembly, but with aftertouch, I can just assign modulation to aftertouch which greatly simplifies playing guitar lines with RealStrat, since you want a free hand for pitch bending anyway. (this is why separate mod and pitch wheels, in my opinion are inferior to a combined joystick.) There are a bunch of switches with tiny writing on the top and engraved (but utterly unreadable in any reasonable light) writing on the unit side that do necessary (power off/on) and strange (midi merge on/off - why on earth does that need a tiny dedicated switch just ready to be flicked the wrong way during a gig setup, I don't know). THE UGLY The software!. If the Martians ever invade and figure out the purpose of music, this is the kind of software they might create....Where do I start... Well, first, lets look at all those knobs and buttons. 11 switches, and, to a large extent,one knob, are permanently dedicated to functions that many of us simply don't want or need. A dedicated transpose button?. Octave transposition switches as well?. A dedicated ACT button that is totally useless if you don't use Sonar?. (and unfortunately I no longer do. It's a long story, I won't bore you...) So the actual complement of knobs and sliders is somewhat reduced. Sure, there are four general purpose buttons plus a full set of transport controls which can be programmed to do anything but which you probably want to control the transport anyway - not a bad thing, to be fair. And then nine sliders for drawbars, etc, eight drum pads which are reprogrammable as general purpose buttons, and a VLINK button which - thank goodness - is reprogrammable. At this point the first of the seriously Martian decisions shows up. There's a dedicated shift key but it never occurred to Roland to make this affect the buttons and controllers. A great opportunity to double the controllability - squandered!. This is seriously annoying and doubly so because the sole purpose of the shift key is to enable numeric values to be input using some of the other buttons. But - guess what - this doesn't work for the one place it really needs to - sending program change messages. No, you have to increment/decrement using the master control knob. Now, do you have any idea how SLOOOW that gets with some hardware (and software synths)..... Let me just walk through some of the other truly stupid software design decisions. You can only send MIDI data to the MIDI out port when you have an external power supply plugged in and you've switched USB off. Those of us who have external hardware synths AND a computer didn't figure in Roland's genius decision here. To be fair, you can work round this by setting up MIDI-OX on your computer to re-route MIDI back to the A800 at which point it will send its own keyboard and other events back out of its MIDI port. But this is a truly convoluted workaround. It never ever occurred to Roland that the MIDI channel on which the keyboard transmits should be stored as part of the 'control set' (i.e the individual patch map, of which you can store 20). You can assign a MIDI channel globally and another one to be used when another of those stupid dedicated keys is pressed (LOWER) but that's it. These channels affect all control sets. This makes controlling something like Hauptwerk's organs unnecessarily intricate, to say the least. Other minor annoyances are that managing setup changes from the keyboard itself are unnecessarily painful - you have to press two buttons simultaneously to go into edit mode - why, when so many other stupid functions have their own button, I don't know. And then navigate a convoluted menu system using the master control knob, with no obvious way of backing up one level if you go down the wrong path - you have to exit edit mode and start over. A more major shortcoming. All those buttons light up beautifully. Does the A800 therefore respond to MIDI ins and light the button up if you send back a MIDI message (as my BCR2000 controller does, for instance). Well, no. It doesn't. Why is that annoying. Well, I could have set it up so that when the transport is in PLAY mode the play button is lit and then when rewind is pressed, the play button goes out and rewind illuminates. That would have been easy. I could just have added a second copy of my full-duplex BCR2000 control surface plugin and had the controls send the appropriate CC messages. But, as I said, forget it. The A800 won't respond to any incoming MIDI messages - about all it can do is route them to its MIDI out, or of course, it accepts some of them as reprogramming messages from the PC-based software (which by the way is pretty good, at least, it seems to be solid and simple to use. Must have been a different team of developers....). A couple of last gripes. Roland couldn't be bothered adding support for MIDI MMC messages which most transports use. Now they are just SysEx messages and you can set them up, slowly and painfully, but this is annoying. And finally, the documentation. I love documentation that says 'Rotary Encoder Mode'. This mode sets up Rotary Encoder Mode for the control. Gosh!.... So, to summarise. It's very well made. It plays beautifully, albeit the aftertouch requires a fair bit of pressure The firmware and associated PC control software and the drivers seem reliable. After a good deal of head scratching and manual consultation, you can probably get it set up to do more-or-less what you want. I'm still pleased with it. It's the Least Worst option rather than the best though The design of the firmware sucks. I'm so baffled. Years ago I owned a Roland MV-30 all-in-one music studio. In one box it was a 16 track MIDI sequencer and a ROMpler. It was utterly intuitive to use. I loved it. So I can't understand how Roland can screw it up so badly. Still, it's useable. But only its mother could love it, I'm afraid....
post edited by aj - 2012/10/17 14:44:08