Hi MOXF,

I've actually thought about this a lot I am a American woodworker metal fabricator and a bit of a tinkerer. I own a moxf8 the sides are a plastic colored material. I was a little attracted to this color at first but the color has gotten old quickly. The instrument is awesome and the Japs really know their stuff. It's mind boggling sometimes. but if you want to know..my opinion. I think they should have done the sides in wood or metal. I think an all white or gunmetal-blue or black grained/stained metal would have been the best. The main problem is dust. The unit as a whole, has that textured flat colored plastic and it picks up dust very quickly. With the textured plastic it's also hard to spread around any kind of cleaning solution. You are limited to canned air and dusting. To combat this I went to my local upholstery shop and designed my own custom cover and had the shop sew it up for me. I picked a leather like texture vinyl and chose a maroon thread color for the seams. For about 130.00 bucks I had a really nice custom cover.

Regarding the lipstick/makeup colored endcaps. I can feel there are three screws on the bottom on each side. Maybe when I have time I'll look into pulling these off, I've been speculating on how hard it would be to remove them and then re-make them in my shop in a more durable attractive material. I think the original intention was how to get away from having to market an all black keyboard, as that seems to be the norm. Also the plastic is cheaper and lighter, here you have this expensive piece of equipment and the design team is out on the path looking for ways to cut cost. Unfortunately plastic cheapens the product in cost AND appearance.

It's plastic - and an easy way to tell the difference between a MOX and MOXF.

If black - then the keyboard would not be as easily recognized vs. the MOX.

Guess there's other ways they could have done this - but the ID (industrial design) department decided on red sides.

The MO series is a value "baby Motif" line. So if you start to increase material costs (assuming metal material and tooling costs are higher than plastic - not an expert here) then you start to degrade the goal of the product line.

Appearance or not - the insides are 80% (plus) a Motif - which is a few times more expensive. I've never played a gig where an audience member complained about the aesthetics of any keyboard I was using. There was a time I was using a "toy" keyboard that happened to have MIDI (Yamaha PSR 510) but paired with an EX5R (rack synth) for the sounds.

Durability is a tradeoff you make when you spend less for the Motif tone engine.

Thanks everyone!

William wrote:

Regarding the lipstick/makeup colored endcaps. I can feel there are three screws on the bottom on each side. Maybe when I have time I'll look into pulling these off, I've been speculating on how hard it would be to remove them and then re-make them in my shop in a more durable attractive material. I think the original intention was how to get away from having to market an all black keyboard, as that seems to be the norm. Also the plastic is cheaper and lighter, here you have this expensive piece of equipment and the design team is out on the path looking for ways to cut cost. Unfortunately plastic cheapens the product in cost AND appearance.

If you figure out how to take the end-caps off and put them back on - let me know.

Might be nice to have them painted a "matching" black color, etc.