Tenori-onOrange
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Yamaha brings Tenori-On Orange to US soil for $700, dares you to rock your own socks off
Here's hoping you didn't pay your British bud to bring you one of those fancy Tenori-On Orange music makers over the holidays, 'cause if so, you just paid an absurd premium to get it a few months ahead of time. Oh, and now you've got an AC adapter that's bigger than your face. Nice. At long last, experimental musicians here in America are being treated to a native version of the Tenori-On O, which is the "more affordable" sibling to the also-shipping Tenori-On W. Functionally, the new O model is exactly the same as the original W model, except it can't be operated with batteries, its 256 orange LEDs are only visible on one side of the unit and it's encased in plastic; Yamaha's marketing the O to producers and studio hounds, whereas the W is made more for live performances. Whatever your fancy, the O should be available in a matter of moments for around $699.99 on the street, while the W can be had for around $300 more.
Yamaha intros more affordable Tenori-On 'Orange'
It's been well over a year since we published our take on Yamaha's perplexing, beautiful and all-around intriguing Tenori-On concept, and evidently the masses have spoken out. This week, the company announced that it will soon be shipping a "more affordable" version with the name Tenori-On 'Orange,' with some vendors already leaking a £649 ($1,077) MSRP. Put simply, the new Orange version will retain all of the musical functionality that the original had (or has, as it were), but the magnesium casing will be replaced by a rugged plastic one and the battery / back panel LED options will also be removed in order to shave costs. Still, we're all for peeling back on the flash in order to get more music makers into more hands, so we'll certainly look to wrap our own paws around one when it starts shipping in December. Update: Engadget Japanese just did a quick hands-on with the Orange, check it out! Gallery: TENORI-ON standard model "TNR-O" [Via MusicRadar]
