Korg Kronos Details released!

■9 synthesis engines on a single workstation, available in 61, 76 and 88 keys. The engines are:
■SGX-1 Premium piano: Piano German with more than 4 GB in samples. 8 layers, choice of opening angle of the tail of the piano.
■MDS EP-1 Electric piano, electric pianos (with sound “signature” by George Duke, Herbie Hancock Rodan Rudess or others)
■Tonewheel CX-3 organ n: integrating technology famed cx-3 in the kronos. Drawbars controllable from its faders. Leslie Posilibidad to adjust the joystick, from speed to the position you just rotate …
■MS20-ex Legacy Analog Collection: emulation of vintage Korg MS20.
■Ex Polysix Legacy Analog Collection: Polysix emulation.
■AL-1 Analog Synthesizer.
■NOD-7 Waveshaping VPM Synthesizer
■STR-1 Plucked String Synthesize r: new generation of modeling. You can choose from the material of the rope, until the tension, the execution (if pick, rub with finger ,etc)
■HD-1 High Definition Synthesize r: from all types of samples.
■Account with a set of 16 “sets” may be, from Programs, to vans, to sequences. What makes the live performance much easier and full of infinite possibilities. One of the most exciting new features is that you can move from one set to another without interruption of sound (so if you keep notes of the previous set, still playing …)
■It eliminates the concept appears rompler and integration / provision of more than 12 gb of content hosted on a 30gb hard disk SSD. 1 GB of RAM.
■Has integrated USB connection to your computer, not just save / edit, but also as a USB interface with 2 inputs and 2 outputs.
■Section 16 effects available. 9-band Equalizer general. Flexible Routing. Professional mastering tools.
■16-track sequencer

Detailed specs from Korg forums:
"Prepare to be amazed"

The specs are probably not direct from Korg so they could be incorrect.

Peace

Now it is on the homepage of Korg:

Korg Kronos

'from a built in solid state drive' about time that keyboard manufacturers started using SSDs, with a PCIe SSD going at 500-600MB/sec it would take only a few seconds to load the 4gb patch in ram...

I'm sure Dewster will drop dead at this news, so it's a sad day. ;^)

EDIT: Well, maybe not. We want that $5.00 worth of 4GB in every day DPs as well.

Greg.
p.s I've already been defibrillated twice......

.

Nice! About time they updated the OASYS concept with modern hardware. Guessing it comes standard with an OASYS-like price as well.

Still RH3 ;-(

See my post in the Namm 2011 thread...

I hope it's indeed the latest SSD incarnation with > 500MB/s throughput and without degradation after a period of time, otherwise complaints may pop up after a while with the premium-grand unit. Who dares first ;-) Some others might wait until the first revision...

[quote=JFP]I hope it's indeed the latest SSD incarnation with > 500MB/s throughput and without degradation after a period of time/quote]

SSD 'degradation' happens pretty much only as a side effect of writes, the samples preloaded at the factory will not suffer any slowdown no matter what happens, if they use the SSD to store additional samples made by the user those might be affected, but modern controllers do their own garbage collection nowadays so I doubt that'd be a problem either.

After reading all the specs ; what wasn't clear to me is if the RH3 keyboards feature After-touch. On the M3 series they do. Here I couldn't find any info on that. Might imply they do not. Perhaps someone at NAMM can ask the Korg guys ? (It's a master controller / workstation/synth after all , not a stage piano).

This looks like a great keyboard (street price apparently around $3k US) but I'm having a problem with finding info on the stated 4GB piano memory. The specs page at Korg seems to be down at the moment, but before it disappeared I saw a figure in the mid 300megs range for PCM samples. So I'm a little confused.

Edit: OK the specs are back up and they show Preset PCM memory of 314MB for 1500+ multisamples plus drums, and a total RAM capacity of 1Gb (with this note: "The memory available for RAM samples will change based on the use of Expansion PCM libraries. About 273MB is available when shipped from the factory (when loading the file named “PRELOAD.KSC”)")

I think the 4GB may have been wishful thinking!

The piano sample is, as I believe, stored on the 30gb SSD drive and not in the PCM memory.

Richard, do you have the link that shows the piano sample size? Like I said I can't find it.

This is from the Korg site:

SGX-1 Premium Piano - Piano sound engine
You’ve never heard pianos like this on any workstation. To accurately capture the rich character of a concert piano, Korg abandoned working within the limitations of existing sampling methods and took advantage Virtual Memory Technology (VMT), able to play large samples directly from the internal high-capacity Solid State Disk (SSD). The SGX-1 Premium Piano sound engine offers two distinctive grand pianos; a rich German D piano, and a robust Japanese C model. Each uses superb, un-looped stereo samples sampled at eight velocity levels for each and every key. Thoughtful attention to detail preserves the realism and warmth of the piano sound; this extends even to sampling and reproducing the body resonances of the grand piano, as well as the mechanical noise that occurs when the keys are played, or the damper pedal is pressed and released. The foundation of any keyboard instrument is the piano; the SGX-1 engine allows KRONOS to confidently deliver on this sonic ideal.

The size of the piano is available with the same text from many websites. Google: Korg+Kronos+4gb . The information can be incorrect, of course. But two pianos and eight velocity levels with no looping should take a lot of space.

How can you access that hypotethical 4Gb piano sample, if you don't have enough RAM to load it in? Or am I just being stupid?

E: Ah, VMT. Doesn't say much to me, though. Seems a little suspicious, somehow. Not convinced by the longevity of SSD's either.

You don't have to load it in; it streams directly from the Ssd. The ram memory is for other things. It's a software grand build into a hardware synth. Ivory meets Rompler ;-)

Virtual Memory. Only those memory pages that are actually used are loaded into RAM, others are discarded and reloaded when needed again. If The disk (SSD) is fast enough then this works fine.

Can't answer that one. Best guess is that the SSD is fast enough. It is delivered with 1 gb of RAM and can be expanded to 4 gb, if I understand correctly.

This is a really question for Dewster.

Really weird that everyone other than Korg seems to be shouting about this reputed 4GB - you'd think they'd be crowing over an achievement like that! If it proves to be accurate info, it's a major step forward.

Not sure if the sample size is 4GB or not, but I do like the sound of: "... Each [piano type (there are 2)] uses superb, un-looped stereo samples sampled at eight velocity levels for each and every key."

Wow, this thing seems so sweet!

If the action is nice enough, and the price is not very expensive, could be a winner.



SSD is fast enough for reading directly all the 88 notes (and beyond) simultaneously from the drive. You don't need to have all the sample set in RAM if you have storage fast enough for reading the samples on the fly.

Longevity of SSD it is usually compromised only by writing repeatedly (thousands of time). In a device like this, where SSD is mostly used for reads, it should last decades or centuries.

Ah, thanks. Not very familiar with SSD's yet

Dimensions: (W x D x H)
88-key: 57.28” x 16.18” x 5.71”
1,455 x 411 x 145 mm

73-key: 48.94” x 16.18” x 5.71”
1,243 x 411 x 145 mm

61-key: 41.42” x 14.25” x 5.28”
1,052 x 362 x 134 mm

Weight:
88-key: 50.71 lbs. / 23.0 kg

73-key: 44.75 lbs. / 20.3 kg

61-key: 27.56 lbs. / 12.5 kg

Data retention is not all that fantastic though - according to this document, it's about 10 years:
http://www.imation.com/PageFiles/83/SSD-Reliability-Lifetime-White-Paper.pdf

I agree that the repeated write wear-out issue shouldn't be a factor for most users though.

Greg.

Yes, you are right. I forgot about data retention. To solve that it should be enough to rewrite the data on the SSD once every 8 years or so. But I don't know if that is practical or possible in this case.

it wouldn't surprise me if this was one of those things that the service will do when replacing the instrument's internal battery (which usually in most instruments dies in the 5-7 years range) it wouldn't be that hard to take care of...

For instance, with Kontakt you can play 10GB pianos with only few hundreds of MBs loaded in memory. I think only attack sounds are stored in RAM. The complete sample will be loaded from HDD after the first milliseconds.

This is a game changer in workstations , it just shows how terribly "Old" the Motif XF was when it was released.

As I talked about in another message not long ago, it's not $5 for 4 gb of real-time accessible memory. As I understand it, the cheap-per-gigabyte SD cards and SSD drives apparently use NAND flash memory, which functions essentially as a hard drive replacement (i.e. for "offline" storage); whereas much more expensive NOR flash memory is needed for RAM-style access (i.e. code can be executed "in place" and does not have to be copied into RAM first).

And this really illustrates how Korg took a different approach here. While Nord, Yamaha, and Kurzweil have chosen flash RAM as the vehicle for downloadable and user samples, Korg chose SSD streaming through a VM (virtual memory) system. My guess is that, like the OASYS, the Kronos is Linux based, which means VM support already existed in the OS, making this approach feasible.