Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Yamaha CS80

I was checking out another keyboard to buy here in Chicago. It's
always interesting going to see another collector's stuff. The last
two guys I visited were real young, like mid 20s, and had EXTENSIVE
collections of stuff. Anyway, sitting conspicuously in this guy's
living room was a large... silver.... instantly recognizable
profile - my heart didn't really skip a beat because I KNEW there
was no way it could be a GX-1. And in fact it was the poor stepchild,
the EX-1. Didn't have the giant tone cabinets but otherwise in
immaculate shape.

I don't know how rare these are or how much they're worth. Mark
Glinsky tried for awhile to sell one for $3,500 (with the speakers),
don't know if he ever did. Anyway, I got to play it briefly.
Basically my impressions were (without playing with it extensively
at all) that it's like the CS-80 presets, without being able to do
filter sweeps and "real" analog synth stuff. I'm not sure how many
good sounds are in there. Basically it's an organ that makes different
kinds of sounds. I have two main conclusions to report:

1. IT'S JUST SOOOO G∗DD@MN COOL TO LOOK AT!!! Has the full pedals
and bench. You really need a white satin jumpsuit with tall collar
and cape or something similar to wear when playing it. Much like
internet photos don't portray how physically large a CS-80 synth is
when you finally see one in person, the G/EX-1 is like literally
the size of a freakin' coffin.

2. The uppermost solo manual does have the side-to-side aftertouch
of the GX-1 and was set to modulate a bunch of parameters in pretty
wild fashion. Really cool to actually get my hands on that and
see how it feels and works.