Being forced to retire my old D-50 that served me well for the past 15 years, I hesitated to choose the successor for the home use of myself as well as children that started to learn to play.
And after the first week of use, I'm still astonished how great the instrument it! And If I had to describe it in a few words I'd say: "no compromise".
My experience with other instruments taught me not to choose a compromise and rather spend a bit more (if only I could afford it) to guarantee long years of uncompromised satisfaction and build this special bond with the instrument, every time you take it in your hands or sit in front of it. As the space for a keyboard in my desk studio was limited i chose the 61 key option, with semi-weighted keys. For a moment I was hesitating if taking the non-weighted keyboards at the moment my teenagers are going to use this instrument to learn was right. Now I'm convinced I took the right decision: the keyboard of Fantom 6 is marvelous. Surely, it is not a piano keyboard, yet its response is just great.
The construction seem very solid and I'm pretty convinced it will last for ages (hope that the longevity of the electronics will be similar to the one of 1985s era of Roland!). Sturdy chasis, with a lot of montage screws simply guarantees that there is rattling, et (as I needed to remove one of side panel to fit the instrument inside the desk, I had to open it and hence checked myself).
The quality of all dials is as you'd expect for an instrument of this price tag, and the touch screen makes the use so much easy: my 9 year old daughter is able to choose the instruments to compose layers with all the natural gestures that this young generation has with tablets and smatphones already. And still, having enough REAL controls for everything you may want to control in real time, without digging through endless menus brings so much confort. I particularly love visual feedback (and touchscreen-editing) when playing with filters.
The set of options seem endless, and surely catches all things I was dreaming to have in a keyboard (I did not try the Roland Cloud instrument simulation yet, and I look forward to it). The possibility of sampling instruments directly to Fantom is surely useful as well as tons of other options (there's lot about this in YouTube anyway).
The V-Piano synthesis delivers great and natural tones, with lots of variety to play with the tembres. Hammonds are fantastic. Needless to say about endless lists of pads. The raw power of Fantom is, again, with no compromise, and you could hear it in the complex multi-layered "scenes" that are so responsive.
The set of features for a synth-fan seems complete - it seems there is no other piece of gear that I would dream of purchasing now - everything is in! And in addition, software updates seem to enable new functionalities not available before (2.0 release of software last week enables quite a number of interesting new features); hence, hopefully with time you get even more bang-for-the-buck from Roland software developers.
The price is very high (ie. a bit of a madness for a non-professional use). Still if you compare it with a price of an upright-piano, and take into account the amazing versatility of Fantom, it is well compensated from my POV. And I'm sure it will accompany us for long years of musical adventures in my family.
