(B-Stock) Medeli AKX10 61 toetsen keyboard zwart

The box contains the keyboard, PSU, music stand and a basic quick-start guide. The PSU is the laptop type and comes with a two-pin plug - Bax supplied a UK adaptor but you can also use any standard "figure of 8" plug - cheap and widely available.

The AKX10 is quite heavy for its size and feels good and solid - no creaky plastics. The kays are a mixed bag - there's very noticeable wobble in the black keys and the plastic feels cheap and soft but the action feels okay to me (I'm not a pianist, fwiw). The various knobs and switches all feel very good and the joystick is very good.

Powered on, most of the controls light up - changing colour or brightness when selected. It looks really cool. The screen is terrific - big and bright and very responsive. Viewing angle is very good. The layout of the screen and controls is sensible and the way you can operate many of the same controls from the screen, from buttons and also from dials makes it extremely easy to fly through settings. Set-up is simple - most defaults are fine. Cosmetic options include setting a colour scheme for the LEDs and "breathing lights". You can't fully choose the colours, you're limited to picking from a few presets - but they well chosen.

Soundwise - the speakers are very good but not quite hi-fi as there's a slightly boxy tone to the sound - tweaking the global EQ improves it a lot and running it through monitors or other suitable external system really pays off. It's easy to tweak too - just connect your laptop or phone to the Medeli via usb or bluetooth and when that sounds right, you're done. Stereo separation from the onboard speakers is impressive, and not just when sat on top of the keyboard. If you do use external speakers and/or headphones, you can choose to have the keyboard's own speakers on or off.

The onboard sounds vary from decent to very good. In addition to the sheer number of sounds, there's the option to "create new sounds" by messing around with the default tones - you can save those new tones to user memory and recall them very easily. You can layer upto three sounds on your right hand too - and that lets you create some amazing sounds. Some of the sounds have extra details - such as finger noise on the guitars. That's not always a good thing - the "zing" sound on the guitar gets annoying after a while and is frankly - wrong. I'm fussy because I am a guitarist - you really don't get that "zip" sound on unwound strings and it's really not that common or that LOUD an sound for most guitarists. It's the same with the saxaphones - the sound of BIG intake of breath might work as a one-off but it's slathered over some of the sax sounds and it's too much. Thankfully, there's over 1,000 sounds - so one or two rejects is not really that big a problem.

The onboard styles are as expected - a lot of the usual home-keyboard favourites and slightly cheesy versions of genres like "rock" and "hip-hop" - but they're well assembled and with three intros, three outros, four mains plus fills and phrase pad, there's a lot of variety with very little effort required. You can also create new styles entirely from scratch - but the editing is VERY limited so you'll need to be a very good player to pull that off, especially for laying down the drum track. There's also a whole load of built-in song in the "Album" - those are basically presets using the onboard styles, ready assembled for a known song. The phrase pads let you add little flourishes with a single key-press and are placed perfectly for the right hand to reach easily.

Some online reviewers complained that MidiFile playback can give odd results. The trouble is, the MIDI "standard" has been ignored or extended so many times plus many supposedly Standard Midi Files were badly written in the first place, so it's common that you may need to tweak some to get then working properly. For the most part, I found that good Midi files sound fine without needing any extra effort - it was older files that were hit and miss or amateur ones that were dodgy to begin with - I tested a few and they also failed to play correctly on other hardware.

Everything about the onboard sounds, styles etc can be tweaked to some degree - relative volume levels, type and depth of effects, for example. There's a desktop app called GrandSuite which is used to add styles and sampled sounds. Actually, it's more accurate to say you NEED GrandSuite - and that's where you hit the first major downside of this keyboard. You can convert Yamaha styles to work on the Medeli - giving us access to a vast library of styles - trouble is, you first have to run them through GrandSuite, where you are expected to set the instruments, volume, panning etc BUT you can't actually hear them until you load them to the keyboard - and then you do the rest of the tweaking. And it gets worse - you can't load or save to the AKX10 from your laptop- you have to use a USB flash drive, constantly plugging and unplugging in and out of the keyboard and the laptop - it all feels a bit "old fashioned". I'd say this is the single biggest problem for the AKX10 - and it really starts to grate after an hour or two of messing around (and the USB socket is carefully placed at the back, right behind the music stand - so you can't easily reach it). I also found another USB issue - the AKX10 refused to recognise some but not all USB flash drives. The solution - for me at least - the drives MUST be formatted as FAT32 and MUST be using MBR rather than GPT. Trouble is, Windows won't even let you format FAT32 drives larger than 4GB and most people will never even have heard of MBR/GPT - mainly because MBR and FAT32 belong in the stone age. It took me hours just to get USB working and I'm very experienced with IT - that really shouldn't happen in 2022. (ExFAT has replaced Fat32 - it is natively supported in Windows and is officially now THE filing system for SD cards - most USB flash-drives now come formatted as ExFat - Medeli are years behind the curve on this, it's not some fancy new tech that may not catch on).

Anyway - once I got it working with USB, I was able to upgrade the firmware and install Medeli's expansion pack. The firmware update is essential - it cures some known problems and adds some important features. The expansion pack isn't essential but is definitely worth getting as it gives some excellent new styles. I managed to add some styles that I've converted using GrandSuite - some are absolutely perfect as is and some need tweaking. I've also added some sounds created from samples and even from soundfonts usinng GrandSuite. That is another iffy area - you can't simply add samples or sounds via USB or the flashdrive, you have to create a single, huge file and add that - trouble is, it replaced the existing expansion pack you got from Medeli. The "solution" is to merge the files in GrandSuite - but this is a problem that simply shouldn't exist - a silly amount of faff just to try-out one sample. However, when you do get a good sound on there, it's as easy to use those as to use the onboard sounds and the results can be amazing - giving you pretty much an unlimited range of sounds. It's also worth noting that you can add whole MIDI files and even audio files - so you can bung your own mp3's on there and play along or just listen to them.. And if you use the AKX10'as microphone input for a singalong, you can use this as a karaoke machine (almost) - you can remove vocals from the mp3 song or change the pitch or tempo independently. The downer is - the AKX10 doesn't display lyrics - not for karaoke and not for your own MIDI songs. Even so, it's a neat feature for a home keyboard. And speaking of the microphone - there's various harmony and vocoder options to add gloss to your vocals.

There's too much under the bonnet of the AKX10 to review everything here - suffice to say it's not perfect but it is really, really good. Looking at various forums, Medeli have been receiving praise for responding to enquiries and the fact that they quickly acknowledged the teething troubles and produced an excellent firmware upgrade hopefully points to a good level of support. They've also recently added an easy "contact us" option on their EU website - which is another sign that they seem to be really trying to do this right. There's no Medeli dealer network in the UK so finding reviews and info in English can be tricky - the various forums do seem to be populated by the same few people having the same arguments over and over. I found the best source of information was from a German youtuber - pcpanik-musik - he's done a series of superb videos detailing how to get the best out of this and I recommend any user or prospective buyer check those (he films in English and German and is very good at explaining the details - there's absolutely no "selling" involved, just hints and advice).

I won't do what seems to be "normal" with reviews of this keyboard - and that's to compare it with other keyboards from the likes of Yamaha and Korg priced around €1000. This does a lot and I reckon it's well worth the money to me - not "cheap" but great value and a big step up from the sort of home keyboard I've had in the past. The ability to tweak and add sounds, styles, songs and more mean it should give me years of fun - and if Medeli can address the niggles, it will be even better. I'm giving it four stars - if Medeli can give us access to the AKX10's memory via USB, I'll up that to five stars because it will then be complete, in my eyes.

Incidentally - I couldn't find the firmware and other downloads on Medeli's European site but you can get them from https://www.medeli.com.hk/akx10 - where you can also listen to recordings of the styles from the new expansion packs.