Triton Extreme + iPod (try 1)

Today I finally laid my hands on the ONLY Triton Extreme in Singapore (as yet).
Touch-wise, it felt like any typical unweighted keyboard. Sound-wise, it was very, very commendable. Umpteen electric piano variations, jazz brush kit, zillions of funky basses, brass, synths… Didn’t have time to run through everything but it generally feels ‘mature’ and not raw or fake.
Feature-wise, it had what I was looking for:
Effects. My old 01/W could only apply two effects across the board, whereas this baby can take 5 different effects with up to 5 individual tracks in a sequence. [For those who are losing me – when you want to produce a full song you can combine up to 16 possible tracks (e.g. keyboard, bass, percussion, strings…) together. Sometimes you want the piano and strings to have a bit more reverb. However you certainly don’t need the same echo in your percussion. This is where you can apply different effects to different tracks, something which my 10-year-old workstation can’t. ] You can also apply 2 master effects on top of that, across all 16 available tracks.
Storage. I tried plugging in the VanPod to one of the Triton Extreme’s USB ports. The great news is that it was able to browse my iPod’s hard drive! The bad news is the boys at the shop couldn’t transfer a pre-recorded song from the keyboard to the iPod. They were stuck on the last step, which had to do with ‘bouncing’ the song (it had to be exported to .wav format first). We will continue this little experiment in the next week or two, when their resident expert returns to work. No major issue; after all I could still connect the Triton Extreme to my barely-used D1600 hard disk recorder with CD writer. Or any external CD writer with USB connectivity. The 512MB Compact Flash card I bought at the recent Computer Fair will also come in handy, as there’s a slot for it. Wicked isn’t it?
Fancy thingamajig: That bright blue globule at the top left corner of the keyboard. They call it a valve. When I press a button and turn a knob or two, my sound becomes punchier. Wow. I don’t know how to explain this thing. Yet.
Price: Not very pretty, and still rather vague seeing how it isn’t supposed to be launched yet, anywhere in the world (so they say). But it is probably slightly cheaper than previous Triton models which also come with less sounds (not that you’d need several hundred of them at any one time).
Expandability: Apparently, none. KORG has put every possible expansion board INTO this baby, so there is nothing left to, ahem, expand into.
Colour: Dark blue. Almost black. Some buttons light up red. The big touch screen is bright blue. I hear the older models are being phased out, so it looks like I’ll never own a sleek silver Triton (ha!).
Due date: Singaporeans will have to wait till late May or June for more units to be shipped. Dang. Sigh.