[sdiy] Korg Kronos/Oasys story

[Bob Weigel]

On 1/24/2011 8:57 AM, karl dalen wrote:
> Amos<controlvoltage at gmail.com>:
>
>    
>> This reply is OT (non-DIY) but boat-anchor is very subjective... I know>plenty of folks who have used&  still use K2000-series heavily, for so>many years... you'll never convince them that the current low price is>any reflection of utility.
>>      
>   
> There are at least two K2000 owners on this very list, me and Barry.
> I do consider mine an boat anchor. :-)
>
>    
>> Ppl could potentially get as much or more use out of Oasys or Kronos, in>which case, not boat anchor.
>>      
>   
> It's a boat anchor if Korg asks customers to pay 8000euro then do
> a lot of promises of free updates deliver none, then severly cripple
> the secondhand market by releasing an updated Oasys renamed Kronos
> for 3000 euro.
>   
> Rolls Royce effekt. :-)
>
>    
>> In general I believe the maxim to always buy based on current features>and never on promises of "to be implemented in a future update."
>>      
> Indeed, only pay for what comes in the cardboard box.
>
>
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>
>    
I should add....that it's like computer hardware.  People have to make a 
value comparison on things at the time they come out.  Years ago you'd 
see the price of a 166mmx cpu or whatever at 100 and some dollars... and 
the 233 might be 700.  In some corporation the 233 might actually pay 
for itself in productivity fairly quickly.  They had to make that call.  
But obviously the cost was not proportional to the gain.  And also if 
the people looked at history they'd know that probably in another year 
that 700 dollar processor would be 150 and there'd be another one out 
that would be 800 or whatever.  lol.

Because I wasn't doing things where CPU speed was going to save me 
enough to pay for itself (eg. writing C code etc.) I never bought the 
higher end stuff.

In the case of a keyboard, people should have some specific goal/game 
plan as to how they are going to use the hardware, much like the 
corporation who couldn't wait til next year's model.  However the *rate* 
of bang/buck here was really outlandish and unprecedented.  The Oasys 
probably took a lot of development.  And maybe the execs figured they 
had enough momentum with the name to recoop it with a minimal number of 
sales or they were doing some kind of high end market 'probe'.... and 
they found out that a better direction might be to create Kronos at that 
price point.  Obviously it's NOT a great way to make friends with the 
high end users since they time depreciation factor was excessive in this 
case.  And I'd call their strategy highly questionable.  Probably one of 
the poorest decisions Korg has made in it's marketing history.   What 
else have they done that cost that much? You can't really compare it to 
the PS series machines because they were so hardware intensive.   They 
offered something substantially unique.   While the Lambda was less 
expensive it was only a slice of what the PS was I guess one could say.  
Far more limited.  Full poly but presets with limited editing.  So 
people weren't stewing going "MAN..two years ago I paid all that and NOW 
they come out with THIS?!!!"

In '81 they come out with polysix and the price is great but again it's 
far far more limited in many aspects.  So the people who owned a PS 
still felt that they had a superior instrument.  Kronos is the swiss 
army knife of Korg's it appears.  All the things they've done the 
emulations of, plus Karma/M3 stuff of course and that all rolled up into 
one.  I'll have much of Jack's demo up among other things on my NAMM 
series on the youtube site when I get around to in the next few days 
here. Along with the Solaris one of the most impressive synths I 
listened to I think. -Bob

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