Korg Forums

[SpIdErWeB]

The V-Synth GT will be replaced (for sure). However, even if the release date hasn't be fixed yet and could be subject to change, it shouldn't be announced before end of this year...

The Musikmesse new product won't replace the V-Synth GT or the Fantom Series that will stay to the catalogue.

Phil

[synthguy]

Greg speaks truth. A Motif with loads more acoustic samples and articulations is very neat. A Fantom with more ARX synth boards would be cool. But without some superb ARX boards, neither the Fantom nor Motif are real attention grabbers. Anything Kurzweil makes is a little better, because VAST is such a powerful synth engine, it has just been tweaked over the past 20 some odd years, and so complicated only geeks like me can wrangle with it. But still, the PC3 is mostly a K2600 with more polyphony, some improved rom samples and a very few VA features.

KRONOS is on a high plateau above them all. As a few have said, we really owe it to KORG to push the affordable workstation market in a big way. The others will have to respond, which means benefits for all of us.

There are a few exciting offerings in the synth world besides KRONOS. Sonic Core (formerly Creamware) offers the marvelous, if expensive, SCOPE XITE system, and is threatening to release Solaris, a Scope under the control of a five octave keyboard, featuring modeled oscillators and filters from various vintage synths, and is essentially a programmable modular.

Spectrasonics mad scientist Eric Persing produces the Omnisphere softsynth/sample player with an insane number of sometimes bizarre instruments to play with.

Arturia offers the fantastic V series soft instruments, such as the Moog Modular V and Prophet V which includes the epic and hard to find Prophet VS. They also produce the Origin hardware tabletop and keyboard synth, which I own, and am an enthusiastic user of.

The Waldorf Blofeld is very cool too, taking the PPG Wave concept into the 21st century with modeled filters and nice effects for a sound which is hard to duplicate. For purists, they also have the PPG Wave 3 softsynth, as well as the massive Q+ Phoenix, with 16 actual analog lowpass filters.

Everyone and their grandma knows about the Access Viris, so I'll throw in the KORG Radias, which I also own, and is a very underrated, very powerful VA synth with excellent sound and massive programmability on the order of a modular.

I'm hoping that Roland has the sense to produce a massively beefed up JD-990 in a keyboard loaded with features and surface controls, perhaps a JD-2000 synthesizer. That would excite me a great deal too.

So at least for me, I have a lot to be excited about. The other three major synth makers surely have enough sense to come up with something interesting. Despite what Kevin Nolan insists, I'd say there are still some talented engineers at Yamaha, and there are plenty of bright engineers with musical insight in Japan they could hire if need be. As EXer says, I suspect a Yamaha EX-5 II in some form is coming, and that would be exciting too. As I posted before, a good Fantom partnered with something like a JD-2000 would do just fine.
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[Hedegaard]

[SpIdErWeB]

Just for info, I haven't mention anything about any potential JD-2000 which is, with the VSynth-Fantom Hybrid, another great rumor that would be cool if it ever happens... (I haven't heard anything from reliable source thought)

Jupiter name is floating in the air, however Roland showed it could re-use the Juno name for keyboards such Juno-G, which are actually far from the original Juno keyboard... So, I wouldn't be too excited.

Roland introduced the GAIA the last year for MusikMesse, and there's still room in the catalogue between the GAIA and VSynth-GT (that shouldn't be replaced before the end of this year or later).

That's all I can say, with the fact it won't have sequencer and it still sounds good (at least from my source ears).

[Sina172]

...

[GregC]

[EXer]

[synthguy]

Well, this is where taste and preference come into the equation.

Yes, the wavetables have been cleaned up and made 16 bit, with more waves in-between for smooth transitions, and tackled the horrendous aliasing of those 8 bit waves. Old school PPG Wave users lament this, but you forget how many keyboardists were writing Wolfgang Palm asking for him to produce an instrument with these very fixes. And in fact, the expensive 16 bit Waveterm system was a response to these issues.

The effects definitely aren't at the level of even a Triton - and I confess that I don't like Triton's reverb either. But they are a step up from the effects on the Origin, a $2500 synth which has effects on the level of a stomp box. Reverb basically has Size (time) and High Cut parameters, and is generic and thin sounding, best used lightly or not at all. The effects are much better on my Ensoniq Fizmo, which is in essence a Blofeld itself, but it would be nice to have a Blofeld on hand since Ensoniq doesn't exist anymore. Plus, the Fizmo requires editor software to get at all the parameters.

Improvement doesn't always mean "better" to everyone, but for most of us the Blofeld is a marvelous version of those old PPG Waves, and far more affordable too. And as I posted, if you really want to get the original sound, you can come darn close with the even cheaper PPG Wave softsynth.
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[EXer]

I haven't got a FIZMO, unfortunately.

The Ensoniq Transwaves synthesis goes beyond PPG/Waldorf wavetable synthesis since the tables are made of 'frames' i.e. samples longer than single cycle waveforms. But it should be possible to get that sound with the Kronos' wave sequencing. All we need for that purpose is good samples of the raw 'frames' of a FIZMO and a bit programming...

[synthguy]

[jimknopf]

I belong to those who don't share high Roland expectations.

My three years of Fantom G use have shown me a totally unprofessional company, which neither was capable of fixing all the silly issues and shortcomings of the Fantom G OS nor proved able of ANY form of modern customer communication.

They showed only two impressive things in the last twenty years: I would add the V-Piano to the Variphrase concept of the V-Synth. The Fantom G had double the potential of what they actually developed, and I regard things like V-Combo as no serious contender for Clavias keyboards, and Gaia as mediocre at best. "Halfbaked" has become the company attribute for most of what they do from my view.

So my trust that this suddenly changes for good at Musikmesse is rather small. Their abilility to listen to musicians has proved underwhelming for a long time meanwhile, while people like their former staff member Eric Persing do the really interesting stuff elsewhere.

I'm not holding my breath for whatever they will show at Musikmesse. And after my Fantom G experience I won't buy anything from them for a long time to come anyway, because I lost each bit of trust in the willingness and ability of this company to offer acceptable flagship/prime gear support.

And, just by the way, this is the sound of a VA, isn't it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE309uauyHg&feature=player_embedded
My bet is that they will claim it to be Jupiter-like, with expanded Variphrase on board (hence the natural instruments pictures). Just a guess...

[GregC]

[Citizen Klaus]

[zahush76]

[GregC]