"KeyScan is unavailable..." on startup(asking Kron

[jrosenthal]

Fair warning, I'm a Nautilus owner, not a Kronos, but I thought this group might help.

I have a Korg Nautilus 73 purchased in March 2023 that is booting up but not producing any sound.

When the Nautilus is powered up it produced an error message that says "KeyScan is unavailable..." but does continue to load the OS, startup, bring up all of my modes and even respond to buttons and lights on the top control, but does not produce any sound.

I have tried all of the logical steps:
- Check all cables and isolate the troubleshooting to the keyboard only
- Reboots, check global settings
- I have opened up the Nautilus from underneath to visually inspect all of the connections to make sure nothing was loose or disconnected. I could not see any indication of a bad connection.
- Open a support ticket with Korg

From what little research I could find on "KeyScan is unavailble", I think the Nautilus 'polls' the connected hardware before it boots and loads the rest of the OS. What makes this error vauge is that "keyscan" may be a very generic error. It could be referring to the physical keyboard or to a hardware key for another component.

The loss of sound output does coincide with the error message of "KeyScan is unavailable", too.

One of the causes I am considering is that the keyboard was packed in a car the night before and the weather is hot in my climate. I wonder if the cause could have been related to overheating in the car in the summer weather?

Questions for the group:

1. Has anyone experienced this before? Are there any other things I can check or do?

2. Could you recommend a REALLY good tech who can troubleshoot this in a Nautilus? It may need a repair but I would like to minimize the hours of bench time for all of the possible troubleshooting to someone who really knows how to get to the problem quickly and knows the insides and repairs well.

Thank you!

[KK]

Even though not fun to not have your synth for a while, I would definitely contact Korg by email or phone about this so they send your unit for a free or minimum fee repair. Your unit is to my view still "new" (March 2023) and such problems should be covered under warranty or taken cared of by the manufacturer. Even if your warranty is only one year (sometimes it is 2 years, depends on country or store, etc) I would first try to contact Korg as this should not happen on such a new machine.

From there, if they refuse to help you for free, then I would check around for an authorized Korg repair center in your area.

[HardSync]

There is typically a PCB inside Korg keyboards called a Keyscan board. It's not a huge PCB, and it has a small, square microprocessor on it. It'll probably have three ribbon connectors on it and a separate power connector. The most likely culprit is that a ribbon cable connecting it to the main board has worked loose, or maybe it's not connected to the key contact board somewhere, or the power connector has worked loose. However it could also have failed or maybe got damaged from the heat you mentioned. I don't know if you can get at that PCB without removing the entire keybed from the frame first. But it might be possible. It could also be a loose connection at the key contact board.

You're right the system performs a check to see which keyboard is connected. Normally it would find that it's a 61, 73 or 88-note keybed and then proceed further with configurations and loading. If it doesn't get a response from the Keyscan board, then that's the error message you see on the screen.

If you have another keyboard with at least a MIDI out on it (or possibly hook it up to your computer via USB), you could connect that to your Nautilus MIDI in and confirm whether you get sound from the outputs.