Lets discuss Kronos BUILD QUALITY:

[Gargamel314]

Can someone comment on the build quality of the RH3 keys? how do they feel and respond? how do they compare with other RH3 keyboards like the M50-88, M3-88, and SV1? Thanks for your comments.

[Chriskk]

Cut costs from WHAT exactly? MOST of the R&D was already DONE. They added two engines, made a few OS enhancements, and decided enough time has passed to trickle down the cost to regular people without pissing OASYS owners off too much.

Good point. Most of the R&D was done 10 years ago when Korg made the OASYS PCI card and the Z1. The total price of hardware should be under $600-700 at most. I don't see how spending $40-50 on high quality knobs and slides could undermined Korg's profitability.

[EXer]

But the Hummer is DESIGNED for off-road. The Porsche is not.

It is

[aron]

Does the mixture of plastic and brushed metal remind anyone a little of the D-50?

[sparkie]

My biggest beef is that the touchscreen isnt angled correctly to meet your eye. The data wheel problem is being solved... If you play live the end caps will definitely get scratched and be really noticable since it is gloss. Although they look really good along with the brushed metal silver...which I really like.

The underneath keyboard plastic on mine is not loose..but lets just say a little flemsy. I would prefer the knob pots to be a little easier to turn. Sliders also too tight. I would also prefer a few more buttons instead of using mainly the screen. Vector joystick is toy cheap. Nice RIbbon controller..

[Gargamel314]

My biggest beef is that the touchscreen isnt angled correctly to meet your eye. The data wheel problem is being solved... If you play live the end caps will definitely get scratched and be really noticable since it is gloss. Although they look really good along with the brushed metal silver...which I really like.

The underneath keyboard plastic on mine is not loose..but lets just say a little flemsy. I would prefer the knob pots to be a little easier to turn. Sliders also too tight. I would also prefer a few more buttons instead of using mainly the screen. Vector joystick is toy cheap. Nice RIbbon controller..

what do you mean the "underneath keyboard plastic?" and is the ribbon any different from the other Korg workstations?

[sparkie]

My biggest beef is that the touchscreen isnt angled correctly to meet your eye. The data wheel problem is being solved... If you play live the end caps will definitely get scratched and be really noticable since it is gloss. Although they look really good along with the brushed metal silver...which I really like.

The underneath keyboard plastic on mine is not loose..but lets just say a little flemsy. I would prefer the knob pots to be a little easier to turn. Sliders also too tight. I would also prefer a few more buttons instead of using mainly the screen. Vector joystick is toy cheap. Nice RIbbon controller..

what do you mean the "underneath keyboard plastic?" and is the ribbon any different from the other Korg workstations?

The gray plastic 3/4 bar underneath the keys that some were saying made squeaking noise. And the ribbon on this is much better than the M3 I had.. or maybe my M3 was not working correct?

[shap]

Consider the problem of a Japanese workstation vendor who is trying to price an 88 Key workstation around $3700 street price in the US. The hypothetical vendor is shipping a device at a pre-determined US dollar price point when the value of the dollar falls precipitously over a brief period (Euro also - forgive me, Europeans; I'm trying to keep this simple enough for the Americans ). They have to make engineering design decisions about two years ahead of the market. Korg's design decisions were made as the value of the dollar was falling rapidly, and they were (necessarily) conservative. In order to match the US (or European) street price of the Yamaha XF or the Roland Fantom G, Korg had to design for a projected production cost about 30% lower than the competitors. In many respects, that set of facts defines the engineering challenge that Korg faced in bringing the Kronos to market.

The end result has to succeed based on what people like you think now, and I make no apology for Korg. Life is hard, and in such matters fickle. Still, I think we should pause in our bitching just long enough to acknowledge that the Korg engineers have achieved something truly amazing when taken in light of these constraints. It's not perfect, but the result you see, considering the constraints, is something of a miracle. That buys you about a week in the market. After that, you still need to pay your $1.35 to get on the subway in New York.

So much for the problem statement. Now let's look at a few minor roadblocks that have cropped up recently:

Just as they were ready to release the product, Korg got hit in rapid sequence by (a) the Tsunami, and (b) the regrettable death of Tsutomu Katoh (the founder). Korg is privately held, and in consequence Tsutomu Katoh's family now faces liquidity pressure to deal with Japanese death taxes. And now the company faces a six month shipping delay on a key product after the product is announced and production on the M-50 is ramped down. The problem of the carrying expense for that delay is hard to describe with any sort of justice. Combine it with declining revenues from the preceding product and you could readily be looking at the death of any well-run company. At this point, everything depends on your banker.

Japanese banking relationships rest on the kireitsu model, which is to say that Korg's banking support was largely built on the personal relationships between Tsutomu-san and his bankers. Seiki-san can inherit those relationships by demonstrating competence, but he does not do so by default. Korg is in a position right now that a Japanese person might describe as "(indrawn hiss) very difficult", and urgently needs to demonstrate the ability to sustain revenue and innovation. For those of you who haven't worked with people in Japan, "very difficult" translates approximately into English as "completely f*ck*ng impossible".

Just as a minor example, consider what would happen if Korg were to temporarily lose the ability to get low-rate financing on invoiced, consignment freight. That is: items that are being transported under the usual and customary international freight terms. That is: every single Kronos unit presently sitting on a freighter in the Pacific or in a Korg USA warehouse. It's an accounting nightmare. It would effectively force Korg to carry two or three months of unsold product on the books as expense. This, of course, would make the company non-profitable, with predictable impact on their corporate debt rating and consequent bank interest rates.

You can safely assume that Korg's competitors are doing their best to get inside the Korg banking relationship to cause just this sort of disruption. That's very scary to Korg. I can't say what Japanese bankers would do, but I know that I would not lend to Korg today on the basis of previous relationship.

Tsutomu Katoh was that rarest of things in Japan: a deep and disruptive innovator in a culture that selects at all points for continuity and non-disruption. Seiki Kato is a strong and experienced manager, but has no publicly available history of innovation. His term of leadership at Korg has been characterized by a reversion to a more conservative and inward-looking Japanese-style company. Financially, Seiki-san is doing everything right. He had to ship those units, data wheel be damned, because he had to get them off the capital line on his books at almost any cost (and to Korg's credit, they have avoided the practice of keeping multiple sets of books!). But from an innovation standpoint he is struggling. Where Tsutomo-san looked for best in breed anywhere, Seiki-san has allowed key outside relationships, including key innovation and engineering relationships, to decay to the point of outright breakage.

So if I were a competitor, I would go and whisper to Korg's bankers about key external IP relationships, isolationist thinking, and the apparent return of feudal-era outlook at Korg. I would wonder what this means for the future of a company that has started a disruptive transition, but seems to have lost the outward-looking perspective to capitalize on it successfully. All of these thoughts would be correct and pertinent, but it doesn't really matter whether they are correct or not. They are sufficient to cause key bankers to pause for re-assessment, and in a world with technology cycles that occur on an 18 month time frame, that is enough.


So the question really isn't "what is the build quality of the Kronos". The question is: can Korg make enough money out of the Kronos as-is to get around to the Kronos successor?

I truly hope so. I like and respect the work that they have done, and I think that with the right kind of leadership they could pull it off.


End of hijack, with apologies. I've seen a lot of bitching without perspective, and I finally hit tilt. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread topic.

[shap]

Most of the R&D was done 10 years ago when Korg made the OASYS PCI card and the Z1. The total price of hardware should be under $600-700 at most. I don't see how spending $40-50 on high quality knobs and slides could undermined Korg's profitability.

This statement is widely repeated and completely wrong. OASYS PCI was a hardware-based synth architecture. Very little of that NRE carried forward into the OASYS workstation. Concerning the workstation NRE, I think that's more up for grabs, but I think that people are (a) grossly under-estimating the cost of re-engineering for multiprocessing and (b) grossly over-estimating the team size.

Remember that a wildly successful synthesizer sells about 50,000 units over its lifetime. Divide the NRE costs over that, and consider that lots of IP and patent licenses are involved...

[jahrome]

End of hijack, with apologies. I've seen a lot of bitching without perspective, and I finally hit tilt. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread topic.

As I have lived in Japan for 15 years now...I know first hand about the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami. It negatively impacted me and my family. But these events did not have anything to do with poorly designed knobs....

[aron]

It wouldn't be hard to substitute lower profile knobs.

[BasariStudios]

Same s**t here!

[RonF]

End of hijack, with apologies. I've seen a lot of bitching without perspective, and I finally hit tilt. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread topic.

As I have lived in Japan for 15 years now...I know first hand about the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami. It negatively impacted me and my family. But these events did not have anything to do with poorly designed knobs....

Why are they poorly designed? FWIW....mine is not poorly designed....it just works. Its not "Design"....its "Quality Control" deficiencies from the factory....which may in fact have underlying causes which stem from the natural disasters. You pick the best built most durable keyboard you can think of....I guarantee you that a certain percentage of THOSE products had QC deficiencies out of the box. And to THOSE buyers....the build quality of THAT keyboard was poor as heck. Its all perspective from your individual user experience. But its really too early (both in time and reliable statistics) to rate the QC fall-out or the durability of the KRONOS. A fully "on-par" unit from the factory, without any deficiencies, has excellent build quality. It just works as designed.

[BasariStudios]

You pick the best built most durable keyboard you can think of....I guarantee you that a certain percentage of THOSE products had QC deficiencies out of the box. And to THOSE buyers....the build quality of THAT keyboard was poor as heck.

You are completely right but there is one problem arising from there:
And to THOSE BUYERS (as you put it) is it simply Screw You?
Or we'll do something about it? Why would i pay 3000 and get a screwed up
machine while you a month later for the same money or probably cheaper
get a perfect machine?

[RonF]

Why would i pay 3000 and get a screwed up
machine while you a month later for the same money or probably cheaper
get a perfect machine?

Not sure I follow your logic, with all due respect. Do we KNOW that whatever QC deficiencies which have already been distributed by KORG were the result of "first run" or a "rush" to deliver? Do we even KNOW that the percentage of QC deficiencies exceeds in any meaningful way the norm for such products, or is in any way worse than, say, a Yamaha Motif XF or Roland Fantom G? Do we therefore have any way to know that if you waited and purchased a unit in 6 months time that you would have any better odds of getting a perfect unit vs. a deficient one? Has KORG indicated, directly to you, any type of 'screw you' position in your customer support requests? I would expect KORG to repair or replace, under warranty (a legal agreement with the consumer), any legitimate deficiency....can't believe for a moment that they won't.

I will concede, that as a matter of practicality, "early adopters" are likely to pay a premium price for any product....and simply waiting for demand to recess will bring the purchase price down. But that's just the price you pay for cutting edge technology, any where. Its YOUR choice to do so vs. waiting. Also....early adopters MAY take the brunt of any first-run design flaws, which may be improved upon in later runs. But at this point....do any of us have any reliable or compelling information to suggest that there even IS a design-flaw of any sort. I think not. I think there are "some" QC irregularities...which may very well be standard of practice and well within tolerance limits.

Again, I 100% empathize with anyone who got a bum unit. It sux! But lets keep some perspective here before we start a campaign of mis-information which is just not supported by the facts.