Kukulkan wrote:After doing some more research, I limited all options to Korg Krome EX and Roland Fantom 07.
Both have longer startup time (around one Minute).
My Fantom-07 boots up in under 20 seconds.
Kukulkan wrote:Due to testing sites and user reviews both have some sort of outdated instruments and sounds because they only sound like their older parents. But maybe there is currently a limit reached about how natural and good sounds can be - still matching to some sort of band or arrangement.
The boards do have many older patches (which is good for when there's a sound in an older board you don't want to lose, or to duplicate the sounds of songs which used those older sounds, for example)... but they do not ONLY sound like their older predecessors.
Krome EX includes the sound of the 2012 Krome, but drums aside, the EX has 728 multisamples (including 44 Stereo multi-samples) vs. 583 multisamples (including 12 Stereo multi-samples), also making the new sample set about 200 mb bigger (4 GB vs 3.8 GB). The new sounds are enhanced grand piano, upright piano, and additional sounds in the categories of EDM, ethnic, and hollywood sound effects, based on the info at
https://www.korg.com/us/products/synthe ... /index.php
Although Roland Fantom-0 contains (or can have loaded into it) tons of legacy sounds, it also has many new generation sounds, first released in the Fantom in 2019. Elaborating on what someone posted on Gearspace:
-Bank A has 239 new sounds (i.e. those that appeared for the first time on Fantom)
-Bank B contains the first 459 tone list from the AX-Edge Keytar (which itself is not that old, but I don't know if they were necessarily all new to that model)
-Bank C has the 128 patches from the Integra-7 Synth Legends expansion.
-Bank D contains the 1109 SuperNatural Synth Tones from the Integra-7 / FA
-Bank E contains the 896 patches from the XV-5080.
-Bank CMN contains the remaining 837 tone list from the AX-Edge Keytar (those not in Bank B)
There are also SuperNATURAL Acoustic tones and a bunch of downloadable expansions, which are a mix of older and newer content.
But newer isn't always better, especially since sounds can be so subjective. While its true that newer sampled instruments tend to have more sample data than older ones, it's not always the case, and even when it is, a newer/larger sample of, for example, a Bosendorfer piano may not be better than an older sample of a Steinway, if you simply preferred the sound of the Steinway piano. It's also hard to compare across manufacturers because companies use different architectures. For example, a single sampled instrument sound (say, the sound of an acoustic guitar) can have 8 velocity layers in a Krome, and only 4 in a Fantom, even though the Fantom sound may be "newer." On the other hand, the Krome can
only create sounds through sample playback, whereas the Fantom-0 uses a combination of sample playback and modeling (depending on the kind of sound). So for example, while a Krome piano sound can have 8 velocity layers rather than 4, the Fantom "SuperNATURAL" pianos add modeling, which arguably makes the velocity transitions more natural, even though there may be fewer samples of them to work with. (Though this is just to make a point about the technologies... personally neither of these boards would be my first choice for pianos.)
If you're looking to emulate the sounds of acoustic instruments, I wouldn't worry about which ones are newer, just find the ones you subjectively prefer.
