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http://www.korg.co.uk/products/workstations/kronos/ws_kronosx.php

Wow! the original Kronos is only a year old!

It looks to be pretty much the same, just a bit more memory. Not sure why they bothered. More marketing than substance, this update.

I hate it when models get updated really soon - it makes all existing buyers feel like their new purchase is already out of date and its value depreciated.

Thanks for posting this. I'm delighted that Korg has come out with a new version of the Kronos, but am absolutely appalled that they continue to hamstring it with that dreadful, clunky, outdated RH3 action, especially after all the grief this action brought them with the original Kronos! These corporate types never seen to learn from their mistakes and are obviously more concerned with fattening their 'bottom line' and the pockets of their shareholders rather than producing a keyboard of a quality that is commensurate with the inflated prices that they're charging for it! I recall bemoaning this fact to a local Korg dealer last year and being told: "I see your point, but you have to understand that the Kronos was never intended to be marketed to classically-trained pianists such as yourself, but to pop and rock musicians, the majority of whom wouldn't know the difference between a good action and a bad one, hence the reason Korg decided to spend their R&D budget on developing the sounds and features of the Kronos as their first priority; to develop a whole new action from scratch is very expensive and couldn't be justified for such an instrument given that the RH3 action has worked well enough for the intended market." As you can imagine, this news is rather disheartening as I very much like the sounds and features of the Kronos and would buy one in a heartbeat if the action was more like the Kawai MP10, or the Roland PHA-III....heck, even Yamaha's GHE action is far superiour to any RH3 keyboard!

Perhaps they've made some improvements to the original RH3 action for this new Kronos that have yet to be announced...but I'm not holding my breath on that one!

*sigh*

K.

Lots of Kronos users have been putting in more RAM. It makes sense that they are starting to ship the Kronos that way, rather than having us all have to upgrade it after the fact.

More memory, more storage, and OS improvements are all good things. And the fact that the old model is not being left behind (all these things can be added) is good too. But this is a better way to ship it, with the extra RAM. (I suspect that they may have moved to the bigger SSD because smaller capacity ones may be getting scarce!)

Really, this is very similar to when the Korg M3 was superseded by the M3-EXP. If they're shipping it with more stuff, they make a small change to the model name to indicate the difference.

I played one recently (not a Kronos, but a RH3 action). I thought it was ok actually. I've played worse. It was smooth and quiet and the weighting seemed fine. I rate it as better (quite a lot better) than the Fatar action in my Nord, purely in a physical sense that is. The Nord's action may not be too great but it does connect very well with the sounds. But just in terms of the physical sensation of playing the keys I thought the RH3 was significantly better.

Just my two pennies...

In your opinion, how would you compare the RH3 to a Yam GH, an action whose design is about the same age?

I think the GH is more successful and adaptable to different models...Hideki's comments always resonated with me that the RM3 just doesn't seem worthy of their otherwise outstanding flagship Kronos. In something like the SV-1, I'm totally satisfied with the RH3 because I'm more interested in the non-piano sounds.

I think I agree with you. GH is better but I find it a bit stiff. But that only struck me when I had a GH keyboard (CP33) right next to others and in comparison the GH is not an easy keyboard to play. But that was just my experience. But yes, it probably is overall a bit better than RH3.

Do you remember the old Yamaha AE (action effect) keyboard? Korg used the old Yamaha action in a number of their pianos some years ago. The SG-Pro-X stage piano certainly used the AE keyboard. I wonder if the DNA of Korgs current key actions have something of (old) Yamaha in them.

Given the subjective opinions of different weighted actions, I wonder if final decisions for a design are made by evaluating for critical measurements (compared to an "ideal" behavior) or by some survey of pianists or if it somehow comes down to one person's opinion.

THe RH3 is indeed a fairly disappointing action however the Kronos itself is now a excellent board ...now they finally have most of the crippling bugs ironed out. The lesson of the Kronos launch, bugs and now update is that sometimes if your a early adopter you simply get screwed !

Let's hope that Korg has learned their lesson and is using their Japanese-produced keybeds this time around for the new Kronos rather than the Chinese-made rubbish that plagued the first edition!

Sadly, I've never had the chance to test-play a Nord as they seem to be unavailable in my area.

Cheers,

K.