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The best.....But in what context???
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EvilDragon
Platinum Member

Joined: 24 Nov 2005
Posts: 1992
Location: Croatia

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 1:36 pm Post subject:

Sina172 wrote:

KRONOS offers a quality that NO SoftSynth can EVER touch.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

operaman
Full Member

Joined: 05 Aug 2006
Posts: 100

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 2:09 pm Post subject:

I see it as a balance. What makes Kronos great is you have the power and flexibility to get your ideas down for immediacy when inspiration strikes while also having the fidelity to use it in the studio for final tracks. It OS also great for gigging musicians who may not want to deal with a laptop. All in all it is a nice balance of features and a welcome addition to my studio. _________________ Korg Kronos 61::Kurzweil PC3X::Alesis Fusion 8HD::Korg Microstation::DSI Prophet 08:::Korg Polysix::2X Oberheim Matrix 1000

synthguy
Platinum Member

Joined: 05 Jan 2005
Posts: 661

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 3:08 pm Post subject:

Chriskk wrote:

The concept of a workstation is outdated as far as studio work in concerned.

That's what they said about studios themselves. Wink

Quote:

Why would a person solely rely on one workstation when there are so many great soft synths and samplers?

For one, not everyone can get an "essentially zero" latency PC or laptop without paying extra for some computer wiz to tweak things out for us. While Macs are pretty nifty with the Linux-like OSX operating system, Windoze can usually be a pain about something - not always, but usually, so PC guys, please don't change my wording here. In my case, my latency floor is unfortunately about 100ms, so any kind of softsynth playing is pretty much impossible until I build a for-music PC. For another, not everyone agrees that softsynths sound all that good, samplers either. Or that "in the box" DAW studios with a library of plugins and softies sounds good either. There's quite the debate in every studio board I'm involved in on whether doing it all ITB can sound as good as using outboard hardware, and especially hardware effects and using a console. Danatkorg himself, who loves his DAW and software, has dozens of hardware components and synths.

And especially, if you have a certain synthesizer flavor you love, softsynths are no real substitute. Analog-style softsynth emulations sound really good these days, but still there are nuances in certain things like oscillator cross-mod or audio rate filter mod which are still not quite right. Some insist that the whole flavor of emulators is off, and it's hard to debate someone who owns a Jupiter-8 and compares it in person with Jupiter-8 V. I dig the heck out of softies myself, finding them to be a great alternative to having to spend thousands of dollars on a vintage analog, but even I can tell that there's a shade of difference to having the real deal.

Workstations are no different. There is a Roland sound and a Yamaha sound, and especially a Kurzweil sound. There's just no way to duplicate all the nuances of sound a Kurz synth can make. In my case, I love all qualities of sound, but in particular I'm attached to the KORG and Kurzweil.

So for me, and many like me, there is NO question that a Kronos is irreplaceable. It's a matter of:

- Owning an OASYS - and much more - for half the price.

- Buying the programming talent of Jack Hotop and his posse, as well as Steve... whatziname (not Sir Kay). The KORG programming team is simply unmatched, and their patches and Combis are truly inspiring.

- Being able to use a number of distinct synth engines - MS-20, Polysix, STR-1, MOD-7, AL-1 - each with their own unique qualities and power through the immense rack of Kronos effects under KARMA control, and with the fantastic sounding drum section either in programmed grooves or in the sequencer. And by the way, I find the sequencer to be more than adequate, never used piano roll editing or any of that jazz.

- And there are all the other goodies like Set List mode which can be anything from patches to sequences!

You guys should know the drill by now. As a guy working on prog rock, having a lot of synth power under the hood is a great asset. While I already have a huge arsenal of synthesizers and romplers, there is a gestalt with the Kronos which is different than my collection of synths, and having all these patches programmed by the KORG team. While I doubt I'll use more than a handful of stock patches, they will be a nice tutorial of what The K is capable of.

Anyhow, my 32 bits.
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Zeroesque
Senior Member

Joined: 17 Jan 2011
Posts: 451
Location: SoCal

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 3:18 pm Post subject: Re: Thou doth protest too much, methinks.

Hanon_CTS wrote:

Zeroesque wrote:

Hanon_CTS wrote:

What does Kronos have that I don't already?

Play one.

That's taken nicely out of context.

I didn't say that I wasn't ever going to buy a Kronos. I'm just going to wait until I've gotten the most from my M3. Then, as I have done since the Trinity to Triton transition, wait until people are selling off their used previous model for the new "Latest, and Greatest".

Sure, I got a used Triton Classic when everyone else was buying the Extreme version.
I'm still watching the prices on the used Oasys, just waiting for the day that it dips into the $3K range.

I'll probably get the Kronos about 3 years later than some, but look at all of the tips, tricks, and patches that'll be available for it by then.

Calm down forumites! The surest way to reveal doubts about your attitudes and purchase habits is to get overly defensive about it.

Cheers, Hanon

Wow, sorry. I wasn't intending to attack, nor was I being defensive.

Hanon_CTS wrote:

I believe that you'll find numerous musicians in this forum that have the same basic view as you, and aren't rushing out to buy Kronos, but asking the question: What does Kronos have that I don't already?

Okay, here goes... Play one. Smile

The idea is that it's very easy to look at the specs and determine what, exactly, Kronos has that any particular rig does not already have. And it's all in one very portable and compact keyboard, something that nobody's current rig could possibly have. Maybe that matters to someone, maybe it doesn't. That, in itself, is a huge feature for me. However, if you don't get any good vibes when you actually play the thing, then none of the specs really matter, and that was my point.

The machine speaks for itself when you play it. Nobody else can convince you to have fun playing it.
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shap
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Joined: 09 Apr 2011
Posts: 194
Location: US northwest

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 6:02 am Post subject:

synthguy wrote:

Chriskk wrote:

The concept of a workstation is outdated as far as studio work in concerned.

That's what they said about studios themselves.

And in fact studios are dying left and right.

synthguy wrote:

Quote:

Why would a person solely rely on one workstation when there are so many great soft synths and samplers?

For one, not everyone can get an "essentially zero" latency PC or laptop without paying extra for some computer wiz to tweak things out for us.

This state of affairs, thankfully, is getting better. There are a few forums where people who do things for a living routinely list their configs and their rationales. You still have to dig, but the info is there. The EastWest forums seem particularly helpful.

But that aside, the reason for a keyboard workstation comes down to immediacy. A PC is infinitely flexible, but in being so it is infinitely generic, and consequently not a well-tuned UI for music. And in that there is an inherent loss of translation. And the pisser is: PCs are open and keyboards are closed, and there is NO ESSENTIAL REASON why this should be so. The era when hardware synthesis made sense has been over for almost a decade. What's left is a failure of transition on the part of the vendors.
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Brian Moore iGuitar+Roland GI-20, Composite Acoustics 6, 12 string guitars, Multiple Ovations from when they were still worth it
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synthguy
Platinum Member

Joined: 05 Jan 2005
Posts: 661

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 8:43 am Post subject:

shap wrote:

PCs are open and keyboards are closed, and there is NO ESSENTIAL REASON why this should be so. The era when hardware synthesis made sense has been over for almost a decade. What's left is a failure of transition on the part of the vendors.

I don't know, I'm not seeing a problem with that.

Why aren't there one or two car chassis makers, which you can load onto whatever interior, accouterments, drive train type and engine you want? Because cars are a very individual choice, and all the carmakers have their own traits and capabilities, personalities, which give us choices.

If you want everything in the box, with whatever synths you want in software, whatever keyboard controllers, whatever DAW and plugins, whatever audio front end you want, you can have it. All kinds of choices.

If you want to go the old school route - which I do, I find everything ITB to be kind of samey sounding and less distinct; hardware synths, even digital, more alive - we have that too. And if we want, we can have both. Everyone's happy. Wink

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shap
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Joined: 09 Apr 2011
Posts: 194
Location: US northwest

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 10:50 am Post subject:

synthguy wrote:

shap wrote:

I don't know, I'm not seeing a problem with that.

Why aren't there one or two car chassis makers, which you can load onto whatever interior, accouterments, drive train type and engine you want?

Actually, you're making my point.

When synthesis relies on custom hardware, it's impossibly expensive to upgrade or augment a synthesizer in the field (that is: after it ships). If an upgrade involves sending you (the user) a new card, and requiring you (with some % success insured by warranty costs) to install it, it's damned expensive. Conversely, if an upgrade requires a software install, the expense is much lower. In this respect, Kronos (and mind you, I'm a huge fan) had the chance to change the game, and choked. Mind you, I'm not asking "What would it take to make Kronos better today?" Rather, I'm asking, "What's the minimal add to ship a Kronos today that would still beat the crap out of Yamaha, Roland, etc. five years from now?" The answer, so far as I can tell, is: "about $10 (cost) of parts"

This requires a platform that has finally made the jump from hardware to software synthesis. Further, it anticipates an ongoing (revenue) relationship with customers, which isn't the way that synthesis vendors think about things. In this sense, the Kronos is very frustrating to me. With compelling reason (mainly currency rates), Korg did everything possible to reduce the production cost of the machine. I get that, as I've noted elsewhere. But somewhere in the last $10 of manufacturing cost (literally) they removed (a) the connection from the D510 motherboard to an ethernet port on the enclosure, and (b) an additional 2GB of RAM. And I can see how this happened, but the consequences are extreme.

Absent a hardware ethernet port, Kronos must update through USB. Which is fine until you want to establish a continuing post-sales market for sounds. My best advice is that Korg should move to support wireless ethernet over USB aggressively. It's incredibly short-sighted not to cable the pre-existing, on-motherboard ethernet port to the edge of the enclosure. They made the same judgment error on the OASYS, so I'm not really surprised.

Absent the marginal 2GB of RAM, today's customers are forced to make difficult decisions about what to unload (or equivalently, to load selectively). Once they figure out the right decisions, it probably doesn't matter. But the need to figure out those decisions is per se an impediment. Dan has stated that the "extra" voices drop the pianos because the sampled pianos are better. He is right beyond any shadow of a doubt. But this misses the point, which is that $4 of marginal build cost would have placed a second DIMM on the board and made all of that confusion and uncertainty unnecessary, and simultaneously would have taken a lot of the question marks out of sampling.

I've seen people on the forums saying, in effect "The extra content is extra, it's a plus, why are you complaining?" I think this is complete crap. The so-called "extra" stuff is stuff that shipped in the standard "Bill of Materials", and as such, should be easy to use. To the extent that the stuff in the standard BoM isn't easy to use it's a marketing, sales, and engineering mistake. Labeling it as "extra" is just a marketing move. I agree, without any reservation, that the as-shipped configuration is game changing. What seems shameful is that any full exploitation of the as-shipped BoM already demands decisions about what to give up. For $4 in cost, that seems like a short-sighed decision.

Now mind you, I'm not engaged here in aimless complaint. I pre-ordered a K-88 knowing every bit of this, and I have no regrets about my purchase. It's more than good enough to justify the cost/price to me! My comments should be taken as "What would it have taken to create a sustainable market advantage?"

So please believe and accept that I think the Kronos, as it is being delivered, is truly game-changing. What bothers me is a sense that for a marginal $10 of parts and Seiki's Japanese sensibilities, the Kronos could have completely and forever wiped out Roland and Yamaha by making an open and extensible platform. But they didn't. And I'm confident that every engineer at Korg US understood this, and that Korg Japan completely failed to get this. Further, I'm confident that somebody will bring my comment to Seiki Kato's attention (presumably without American attribution), and that Seiki-san will find some compelling (and incorrect) explanation for why Korg can't make the jump I envision.

So forgive me if I am one of those rare (though not entirely rare on these forums) people who respects the overwhelming effort and quality that Korg engineers have invested over the years, and laments that for $10 work of vision their work will be largely overtaken by events.
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Motif XF8, Kronos-88 (ordered), V-Synth GT, DT-Extreme eDrums
PC Core i7-920/24GB/3TB (2x)
Motu 2408mk3 + 24I/O
Sonar Producer, everything EastWest
Brian Moore iGuitar+Roland GI-20, Composite Acoustics 6, 12 string guitars, Multiple Ovations from when they were still worth it
Presonus Eureka (2x), TC Helicon VoiceOne
ADAM A7's and JBL 4328Ps, each for its purpose
Border Collies + Misc. Squeaky Toys

EvilDragon
Platinum Member

Joined: 24 Nov 2005
Posts: 1992
Location: Croatia

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 11:02 am Post subject:

Great post, Shap. Pretty much to the point, you nailed it.

synthguy
Platinum Member

Joined: 05 Jan 2005
Posts: 661

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 8:23 pm Post subject:

shap wrote:

Actually, you're making my point.

I'm not too sure about that.

Quote:

When synthesis relies on custom hardware, it's impossibly expensive to upgrade or augment a synthesizer in the field (that is: after it ships). If an upgrade involves sending you (the user) a new card, and requiring you (with some % success insured by warranty costs) to install it, it's damned expensive.

Uhm... I'm not sure what you're getting at.

You buy a Lionstracks with an expired warranty. Something goes down. What do you do? Or maybe the touch screen quits working. What do you do? Or a VSynth GT. Or Oberheim Matrix-12. Or you name it.

You sound like a PC DAW completely ITB guy. Okay, you guys have your own world you live in, and that's cool. But that's for you.

Us hardware guys for whatever reason, and as crazy as you think we are, like our world with all its warts. We don't have compatibility issues, or latency to fight. We don't have licensing crap to endure. We don't have computers that balk at some new software addition to our rigs, and have to bug someone at tech support or on a board somewhere, perhaps over as weird an issue as the software doesn't like the graphics card we're using. We don't have Windoze issues to conquer, or upgrading hassles when we need more power.

And what we also don't have are excessive minimum costs. With hardware, you can buy a reasonably good digital piano for $800, or basic rompler synthesizer for $1200. And it works at powerup, no technical knowledge required, more than to know how to plug the thing into an outlet and headphones into a jack, or wire it up to a stereo or mixer.

But, if you want to go the PC route, now all of a sudden, you have to know if your PC is fast enough. Do you have the hard drive space? Do you have enough ram, a fast enough processor? The right OS? Is the graphics card okay? Can you use the onboard sound card, or do you need something pro-level that's ASIO compliant (most likely)? Is my motherboard PCI or PCIe? So where are the drivers you need, on the disc? Do they need to be updated, how? If this is your general use computer and gaming rig, how well will your music stuff run, or will there be hiccups and crashes? What kind of cables do you need to run to the keyboard controller you were finally comfy with (and how much did that cost)? Going this route, just to play a software piano can easily cost $2000. A lot more than an $800 Yamaha without all the hassle.

Want to take that to a stage? Woah, you really should get a laptop, and that's $700 easy, just for a basic one as powerful and robust as your PC, and you should probably look at $1000 for a PC, way more for a Macbook. And then there are a whole new bunch of soundcard matters to sort through.

And going the dedicated music computer route? Well, nEko isn't cheap, and the lowest price Lionstracs is a $2800 module with no software except I think an Oberheim OB-X emulator. A good 88 note keyboard with plenty of control options isn't going to be a few hundred either. And does it have enough pedal jacks, a ribbon, breath control in?

People forget just exactly what's involved in what they want when they ask for a software only solution. Maybe the prices would be lower if that's all the market offered, but I bet not by much.

Oh and as for lack of ethernet, USB is slower, so... you can't use it? My M3 seems to be fine with it.
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Last edited by synthguy on Sat Jun 25, 2011 4:40 am; edited 1 time in total

Zeroesque
Senior Member

Joined: 17 Jan 2011
Posts: 451
Location: SoCal

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:12 pm Post subject:

shap wrote:

synthguy wrote:

shap wrote:

I don't know, I'm not seeing a problem with that.

Why aren't there one or two car chassis makers, which you can load onto whatever interior, accouterments, drive train type and engine you want?

Dear Shap,

Please send me the code changes to the linux kernel to allow one process to access more then 2GB of memory. I hear that you've "nailed it."

Thanks,

Tim

PS: That should only cost about $10, right?
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synthguy
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Joined: 05 Jan 2005
Posts: 661

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 11:49 pm Post subject:

I wanted to add one point I forgot, and then run off to either kill bad guys on the battlefield or fire up my synths. Stephen Kay posted about the years-long labor and expense required to get the Kronos hardware and software modules and sequencer and KARMA to all work together with Smooth Sound Transition capability. This required a lot of work with all the code, the processors and motherboard bandwidth to accomplish. And this is their stuff which they know, and it still took years and who knows how much money. Now, are you guys aware of just HOW MUCH FREAKING MUSIC SOFTWARE is out there?? How many years more would it take to incorporate this stuff into Kronos, so it works with SST? Or works period? How many developers will KORG have to let in the door to make you guys happy? How mad would you be about the shut-outs? What's the minimum amount of extra time you'd be willing to wait for a Kronos to accomplish this? Would you be fine with making do with the M3 and a shrinking availablilty of OASYSes, while newer more powerful Rolands, Yamahas and Kurzweils gobbled up the market for years? Would you accept a machine which was only partly SST capable? Would you rather toss SST out completely to have an open synth? How much instability would you be willing to accept? How much extra price to have one? Just a few more thoughts. _________________ PRAY FOR THIS PLANET!!

shap
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Joined: 09 Apr 2011
Posts: 194
Location: US northwest

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 8:31 am Post subject:

synthguy wrote:

shap wrote:

Actually, you're making my point.

I'm not too sure about that.

Quote:

Fair enough. Hardware breaks sometimes. I'm not really sure how that relates to what I was saying. I was talking about upgrades, not repair. On the other hand, I have to say that the difference in hardware between the Motif ES and the Motif XF isn't much. It's still basically the same enclosure with basically the same buttons. And this kind of difference will get smaller as multi-touch screens deploy. I can readily imagine an outcome where the "Kronos II" differs from the current Kronos only by having more memory and different software. If that's true, I should be able (for a fee) to upgrade - I shouldn't have to trash a perfectly good, working keyboard to get it.

But a vendor can't upgrade custom synth hardware that way. Most of the customers aren't able to do that upgrade, and the cost of distributing new hardware modules is infinitely larger than the cost of distributing software modules.

Maybe it will help to think of it as a design challenge: your goal is to come up with a synthesizer hardware platform (keyboard, enclosure, display, buttons, motherboard, A/D) that lets you upgrade systems in the field for ten years before the customer is forced to throw out their "keyboard". Working in your favor: it's not a general purpose system, so the resource demands aren't actually changing that much over the design lifespan of the synth.

In my opinion, the current KRONOS is 2GB of RAM, an ethernet, and a capacitive touch screen away from meeting that goal. The ethernet is actually in there on the motherboard - they left out the cable. Or it could be addressed by an OS upgrade, and the RAM could be handled through the service channel. Both would actually be advantages for the device as-is. The resistive touch screen on the current device is unfortunate, because it severely limits the flexibility of future UI decisions, and there is no cost-effective way to have the service channel field-upgrade the devices.

Note that none of these changes would markedly alter the MSRP or the reliability of the current KRONOS. Two of them (the display change and the memory) would have been very valuable on the device we see today.

synthguy wrote:

Us hardware guys for whatever reason, and as crazy as you think we are, like our world with all its warts. We don't have compatibility issues, or latency to fight.

Some of your points are valid, and some not so much. In case you didn't pick it up from my posts elsewhere, my company builds high-confidence embedded systems. Usually that includes custom hardware. Some of our applications have both reliability requirements and latency requirements that make the requirements of a hardware synth look pretty easy.

What I haven't had occasion to say on these forums is that I'm also a former microprocessor architect, so I've done my time on hardware design. So I can tell you that (a) software can be just as reliable, and (b) hardware is merely software with a very constrained set of design rules and a highly inflexible embodiment.

What you are objecting to - validly - isn't software per se. It's software as currently implemented and assembled in Windows, MacOS, and Linux. And in those contexts I mostly agree with you.

There have been really bad and unreliable hardware synths in the world, too. That doesn't make hardware synthesis a bad idea.

But since you are raising valid concerns, and you are clearly worried about the reliability of software, you should think very carefully before buying a KRONOS. After all, once you tear the cabinet away, it's really just a (very impressive) soft-synth running on an impossibly under-powered platform. Smile

On the other hand, if you think something like a KRONOS can meet your concerns, then you've proven my point: software isn't the problem per se; it's how software is designed, integrated, and constructed in conventional systems. Now that is a complaint I can agree with.

synthguy wrote:

And what we also don't have are excessive minimum costs. With hardware, you can buy a reasonably good digital piano for $800, or basic rompler synthesizer for $1200. And it works at powerup, no technical knowledge required, more than to know how to plug the thing into an outlet and headphones into a jack, or wire it up to a stereo or mixer.

My company's hardware device runs tend to go in about the same quantities as keyboard/synth board runs. Turns out, your costs are excessive. The motherboard in a KRONOS, complete with processor and 2G of memory (that is: the way they ship it now), costs $92 USD. That's if you buy at quantity-one pricing over the counter at Frys. The custom boards on a synth actually cost a bit more than that, because 35,000 to 50,000 units is impossibly low quantity when you're talking about custom hardware. Korg (or Yamaha, or Roland) just can't get the kind of economies of scale that Intel gets.

synthguy wrote:

But, if you want to go the PC route, now all of a sudden, you have to know if your PC is fast enough. Do you have the hard drive space? Do you have enough ram, a fast enough processor? The right OS? Is the graphics card okay? Can you use the onboard sound card, or do you need something pro-level that's ASIO compliant (most likely)?

Yep. And basically, all of those issues boil down to two things: (1) the hardware systems involved aren't designed for the job of synthesis, and (2) conventional operating systems are horribly inefficient on all fronts.

And yet, once again, here's that pesky KRONOS using precisely the same hardware you are complaining about. And what's kind of funny about that is that the board in the KRONOS decidedly is not a high-power desktop board. The design purpose of that board was to run the internals of a cheap, low-power, kiosk-type device. But lo and behold we're not asking most of your questions.

Actually, some people seem to be asking a variant of one of them, which is "why don't I have enough RAM to load all the voices that shipped with my machine", or in minor variation "why do I have to unload a bunch of voices to use the sampling features?"

On Windows or MacOS or Linux all of the issues you raise are valid. That's because those are general-purpose operating systems running general-purpose workloads, and because those operating systems don't provide anything like sensible hardware resource management facilities or real-time resource control.

Which, by the way, is why the KRONOS runs Linux as an application and uses a custom microkernel for all the critical stuff. The MOTIF XF tries to get by with MontaVista Linux, and I can tell you from personal experience that it's not real reliable.

In any case, I certainly agree with you that we don't want to run general purpose workloads on synthesizers if we want them to work right.

synthguy wrote:

Oh and as for lack of ethernet, USB is slower, so... you can't use it? My M3 seems to be fine with it.

USB is perfectly fine for what it does. It doesn't solve the problem I'm trying to solve, which is to be able to manage and upgrade the synth entirely without one of those $700-$1000 PCs you seem so worried about. The USB connector doesn't do me much good without a PC to connect to on the other end.

But that aside, why shouldn't I be able to download a new sample set directly at my keyboard? Why should I need to step aside to my PC/Mac to do that, and then go through the hassle of transfer over USB or memory stick?

There's more I want to do that USB doesn't buy me, but that's not stuff that I'm ready to talk about here.

So finally, let's address your concerns about third-party software extensions. That's actually what's driving the concerns about RAM and CPU power, and that's mainly because we have the problem specified backwards in the PC/Mac world. Instead of saying "you're the VSTi/RTAS builder, do your worst and I'll upgrade to catch up. Be really really conservative because I can't give you an sort of timing guarantees about when you'll run. Oh, and everybody should run in the same address space to maximize the impact of bugs!", we should be saying "You've got k milliseconds between here and here to do your thing. If you can't do that, fix your code. You get your own address space and n pages of memory to work in. Oh, and use your own address space and stay the hell out of mine so we have some isolation and recoverability in the event of failure."

There's more. Point is, I guess, that I totally agree with you that we're hopelessly screwed on the PC/Mac side, because we've made almost every possible design decision there the wrong way from the standpoint of reliability and performance. Which is part of why something in the spirit of the NEKO/MEKO will always be more expensive and less reliable than a standalone synth.

But I'm also saying that there are other ways we can make those decisions that lead to much more reliable, predictable, and successfully configurable outcomes.
_________________
Motif XF8, Kronos-88 (ordered), V-Synth GT, DT-Extreme eDrums
PC Core i7-920/24GB/3TB (2x)
Motu 2408mk3 + 24I/O
Sonar Producer, everything EastWest
Brian Moore iGuitar+Roland GI-20, Composite Acoustics 6, 12 string guitars, Multiple Ovations from when they were still worth it
Presonus Eureka (2x), TC Helicon VoiceOne
ADAM A7's and JBL 4328Ps, each for its purpose
Border Collies + Misc. Squeaky Toys

shap
Full Member

Joined: 09 Apr 2011
Posts: 194
Location: US northwest

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 9:27 am Post subject:

Zeroesque wrote:

Actually, a lot less than $10, since there have been Linux kernel patches floating around to do that for a long time. The first one I happen to remember was around 1997. You can google for it yourself.

But it wouldn't help you, because you don't understand what you're talking about.

First, even under the current limit, the Linux constraint is 2GB of virtual memory per process. Linux is, of course, a multiprocess operating system. 32-bit linux kernels and systems have supported up to 64GB of physical RAM routinely since the late 1990s. That configuration option is now discouraged, because it has been supersceded by the 64-bit kernels (on which you can still run 32-bit apps).

Second, and specifically in connection with KRONOS, Linux is just an application. The OS you want to pay attention to here is the KRONOS microkernel.

The additional 2GB of DRAM (that is: the missing memory stick, if you've seen the tear-down photos) is desirable mainly for the purpose of letting the KRONOS load a few more voices from the SSD and still have room for use as a sampler.

My unconfirmed guess that each voice you load into the KRONOS sequencer ends up in its own process at the KRONOS microkernel level, which means we're not looking at any RAM limit issue at that layer. Whether that's actually the design is something I'm looking forward to examining when my unit comes in. The main reasons to do that from a design perspective are the convenience of the real-time scheduler and isolating software failures in one engine from failures in another. And debugging. I don't know if they did it that way, but I know that I would have done it that way for a number of engineering reasons, mainly for reliability.

We deploy our stuff on a high-security, high-performance microkernel of our own. The architecture has been deployed in the field in one form or another for about 30 years; our versions go back to around 1993. The primary reason to use a microkernel for this kind of application is to get your overheads low enough that you can afford the performance cost of isolation in order to make stuff engineerable. For calibration of reliability here, our biggest source of failures in the field isn't due to software crashes. It's power loss. That remains true after you stick a UPS on every machine (yes, UPS's do fail).

If you want to catch up on some of this stuff, Zeroesque, you might consider listening to my course lectures for the graduate level Intro to OS course at Johns Hopkins. Two of my students took over the course in 2007, but if you look at the syllabus for 2006 and prior you'll find audio for all of the lectures. When you're done with that, go read some of the papers in the associated advanced course (600.438). When you're doing with that, you can dig into the last 20 years of my research and learn about about how high-performance, high-security operating systems are designed. An awful lot of that stuff is shipping today in my company's systems. We helped a competing community adopt some of the key ideas to make their security story work, and last time I asked they had shipped more than a billion commercial copies. Which beats Microsoft and Apple combined.

Or since you're in Philadelphia, I hear the Computer Science department at the University of Pennsylvania is pretty good. They can tell you all about what we do. Go ask just about anybody over there.

Sigh. Perhaps you think that I'm dissing the KRONOS team with the things I've been saying. Quite the opposite; they've accomplished something truly remarkable. And it's definitely (as their marketing people say) "game changing"!

What I find frustrating is that because their work is so good, they came within inches (or in this case $10-$15) of permanently rearranging the nature of the synthesis market over the long haul using the device they are putting into the field right now. It would have taken a lot of vision, and I'm a little concerned about Korg on that front at the moment, but the option would be there.

Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph.D.
Managing Partner
The EROS Group, LLC
_________________
Motif XF8, Kronos-88 (ordered), V-Synth GT, DT-Extreme eDrums
PC Core i7-920/24GB/3TB (2x)
Motu 2408mk3 + 24I/O
Sonar Producer, everything EastWest
Brian Moore iGuitar+Roland GI-20, Composite Acoustics 6, 12 string guitars, Multiple Ovations from when they were still worth it
Presonus Eureka (2x), TC Helicon VoiceOne
ADAM A7's and JBL 4328Ps, each for its purpose
Border Collies + Misc. Squeaky Toys

Zeroesque
Senior Member

Joined: 17 Jan 2011
Posts: 451
Location: SoCal

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 5:36 pm Post subject:

Shap, your giant appeal to authority missive is only necessary if you don't know why there isn't 4GB of memory in the Kronos. Your academic prowess notwithstanding, you're making a long series of assumptions leading you to a place where you publicly deride Korg's employees, and border on Japan-bashing. I hope that does not impress any readers of the forum. If it doesn't make sense to you that $10 is the difference between the Kronos as it stands now and some world-beater that you describe, then maybe that isn't actually the case. _________________ Kronos 61, Kronos2-88, Hammond B3, Baldwin SD-10

shap
Full Member

Joined: 09 Apr 2011
Posts: 194
Location: US northwest

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 11:40 pm Post subject:

Zeroesque wrote:

Shap, your giant appeal to authority... [blah blah blah] ...Japan-bashing. I hope that does not impress any readers of the forum.

Actually, it's an appeal to experience, which isn't the same thing. No, at the end of the day I don't know why the extra 2G was left out. I do know (from experience) that it's not an OS issue (which is what you suggested) or a supplier issue or an availability issue. I strongly suspect, based both on 25 years of experience building similar systems and some direct interaction with people who were involved who I cannot name, that it came down to cost issues.

As to Japan-bashing, well, anyone who can read can see for themselves that accusation is just silly.

On the $10 issue, there may be one thing further to add. During cost reduction on any product, there are lots and lots of places where $10 will be removed. Knowing which $10 to put back when you're done can involve very difficult judgment calls, both technical and social.
_________________
Motif XF8, Kronos-88 (ordered), V-Synth GT, DT-Extreme eDrums
PC Core i7-920/24GB/3TB (2x)
Motu 2408mk3 + 24I/O
Sonar Producer, everything EastWest
Brian Moore iGuitar+Roland GI-20, Composite Acoustics 6, 12 string guitars, Multiple Ovations from when they were still worth it
Presonus Eureka (2x), TC Helicon VoiceOne
ADAM A7's and JBL 4328Ps, each for its purpose
Border Collies + Misc. Squeaky Toys

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