The WX5 Negatives

• It's made of plastic and isn't terribly durable. The keys alone can get caught on something very easily and get ripped apart. It's construction reminds me a kid's toy that you get at the dollar store -- you don't expect such a thing to last very long. Who wants to baby their axe on a constant basis? I don't gig anymore but if I did with this thing I would be paranoid about it's survival.
• The keys are mechanical switches. This seems like an incredibly reasonable thing at first glance but it raises two issues:
  • They don't always respond to the same amount of pressure. A light touch has basic advantages for technique regardless of the concern for wearing the unit out (see concerns on construction quality), but it can't really be done here because the switches don't all respond the same to amounts of pressure. That's just basic mechanics.
  • There's no bio-feedback on the pressure either. See, with a saxophone, none of the keys respond too well to the same pressure either (anyone with horn that leaks even slightly knows this) but the difference here is that a sax isn't an on/off kind of thing. The horn responds to pressure on a curve, not a switch, so the lack of continuity is extremely natural.
• The octave keys suffer greatly from this problem. There are a total of 7 positions that the octave keys can be in with two octave keys on the top and two on the bottom. If you go to the high end (I'll ignore the bottom end since it's the same situation) then you hold down the first key to get one octave, two keys to get the next and then just the top key to get the last. Because they don't all respond very well to pressure, it's fairly easy to accidently go from the two-button scenario to one of the one-button scenarios. This is just a poor design.
• The pitch bend wheel is ridiculously far from the thumb rest. I generally rest an instrument with a thumb rest on the knuckle joint, as most people do, I assume. Now, if this is done, then one cannot reach over to the pitch bend. How this got past anyone at Yamaha is beyond me.
• The reed was a huge blunder in this design and it is something that Yamaha just keeps doing (I used to work with a WX11 for a while as well). The reed pushes on a lever that can control pitch bend or modulation or whatever you want. First of all, the reed eventually wears out because this metal lever wears it out. That's ridiculous -- I mean, if your own teeth end up ripping through this thing, I can understand that, but if you have velvet teeth and it can still get worn out from its own construction then that's just unacceptable. The second thing is that the response curve on this lever is completely alien to anything a saxophone player has ever experienced. It's just useless.
• While it does run off of batteries, it sucks them dry in a very short amount of time. (six -- yes that's right, six AAA batteries)
• The breath sensor drifts a fair bit. With fresh batteries in the unit (and near-dead batteries as well) it takes about 30 seconds for it to start drifting. It's a constant correction with the little dial on the back. While the EWI does drift from time to time, the interface on the EWV 2000 is a godsend here. Easy to get to and manipulate.
• Yamaha doesn't seem to be very responsive to its customers. I spent weeks trying to get them to give me some information on parts. It's been almost a year and I still haven't heard back from them.

The WX5 Positives (over the EWI)

This list honestly used to be bigger, back before the EWI 4000s came out, but now there really isn't that much that the EWI doesn't have that the WX5 does have.

• It's smaller and lighter than the EWI 4000s. The EWI 4000s contains the synth which, until they make the IC technology smaller, is going to make the thing bigger. I don't find it an issue at all, but this could be a show stopper for someone that doesn't care about the internal synth.

EWI Positives and Negatives

It's easier to just go to my blog of 05 April 2006 for a look at the positives and negatives.

Conclusion

What can I say? The WX5 just fell way behind in the race. I don't think I'll ever take a WX product over an EWI product simply because the philosophies are so different and the EWI works soooo much better for me, but if Yamaha decides to take up the challenge against Akai here, that would be nice to see!