Kronos will be staying home in the studio

[Xenophile]

It is a powerful and great-sounding/playing instrument, I can't have it flaking out on me when I'm playing gigs. My Kronos 61 is only a little over a year old, but it has embarrassed me on 3 separate occasions now. The first time, all the audio output died despite several reboots. I took it in for warranty service where they re-seated several apparently loose connections, and it worked well for about a year.

But over the last couple months it has been intermittently freezing and displaying the "A problem has been detected. Please reboot your Kronos" message. This has happened twice on gigs... Probably 7 or 8 times at home. I have been running it on a good UPS since the beginning, and I am not using its USB audio feature. I opened it up and re-seated the memory and all the easily-accessible connectors, and it seemed OK for a while, but this weekend (at home, fortunately) the error message popped up again.

It's a great machine, so I'm not going to sell it. It will stay in my home studio with my trusty old Yamaha Motif ES8.

My gigging rig will be a MacBook Pro running Mainstage with Ivory, Omnisphere/Keyscape and Kontakt, a Motif ES Rack, and a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20. Keyboard controllers will be Studiologic SL88 Studio and Roland A-800 Pro. The laptop/rack rig has served me well for about 5 years without ever letting me down. I was just getting tired of having to plug all that stuff in, and I hoped Kronos would be an all-in-one solution. But unfortunately it is not reliable enough.

[GregC]

It is a powerful and great-sounding/playing instrument, I can't have it flaking out on me when I'm playing gigs. My Kronos 61 is only a little over a year old, but it has embarrassed me on 3 separate occasions

It's a great machine, so I'm not going to sell it. It will stay in my home studio with my trusty old Yamaha Motif ES8.

.

That is shitt%$. I would lose confidence, too. I see you have the 2015 Kronos, the most current model.

Hard to generalize if the 'non reliability '' is due to your board or if all 2015 models are similar.

In my mind, if the 2015 lineup was not gig worthy, there would be quite an uproar all over the Internet.

You know your stuff, but I think your particular board has flaws. Thus my reaction would be to hammer Korg for a free replacement . all the problems happened in year 1. Going back and forth with warranty service is not a solution.

I am fairly confident most Kronos owners, who are home studio types, have a reliable Kronos.

Thus my thinking is harp on Korg or your retailer. It appears your Kronos is still going to be problematic at home. Thats not acceptable IMO.

And Imagine trying to sell it later with the flaws.

[psionic311]

Just a guess, but it sounds to me like your sections of your HD might be corrupt. If you're tech savvy, it couldn't hurt to back everything up, format the disk, and re-install fresh.

Alternately, you could install a new OS on a 2nd disk, boot from that, and then copy over what you need from the old disk.

[GregC]

Just a guess, but it sounds to me like your sections of your HD might be corrupt. If you're tech savvy, it couldn't hurt to back everything up, format the disk, and re-install fresh.

Alternately, you could install a new OS on a 2nd disk, boot from that, and then copy over what you need from the old disk.

Lets say SSD [ instead of HD]. How can a Kronos owner 'corrupt ' an SSD ?

I assume we are talking the original factory SSD in this 2015 Kronos.

[psionic311]

An SSD is a physical device, subject to electromechanical stresses. Any physical object, from RAM to power supply to the keybed, can get damaged.

[darwinwiebe]

Usually what messes up a hard drive, whether SSD or platter drive, is interrupting the write process by shutting off the device during writes. Doesn’t matter, though during reads. They’re pretty robust physically, able to take up to 100s of g-force load.

Pretty sad that your Kronos has been having issues. I am an ex trucker and I had my Kronos2 61 riding with me for a couple years. Still running strong.

[GregC]

Usually what messes up a hard drive, whether SSD or platter drive, is interrupting the write process by shutting off the device during writes. Doesn’t matter, though during reads. They’re pretty robust physically, able to take up to 100s of g-force load.

had my Kronos2 61 riding with me for a couple years. Still running strong.

That seems to make sense. When I google my question, what I read is that its normal to have a few bad sectors on SSD.

Its when the bad sectors start to increase, for whatever reason, is when the SSD gets problematic.

I think there might be some wisdom to having a 2 SSD set up in Kronos.

My factory SSD is the OS boot drive. I do all my recording and file creation on a much larger 2nd SSD.
This is probably over cautious.

The standard for a factory SSD 'should ' be +10 trouble free years of daily use.

[darwinwiebe]

Usually what messes up a hard drive, whether SSD or platter drive, is interrupting the write process by shutting off the device during writes. Doesn’t matter, though during reads. They’re pretty robust physically, able to take up to 100s of g-force load.

had my Kronos2 61 riding with me for a couple years. Still running strong.

That seems to make sense. When I google my question, what I read is that its normal to have a few bad sectors on SSD.

Its when the bad sectors start to increase, for whatever reason, is when the SSD gets problematic.

I think there might be some wisdom to having a 2 SSD set up in Kronos.

My factory SSD is the OS boot drive. I do all my recording and file creation on a much larger 2nd SSD.
This is probably over cautious.

The standard for a factory SSD 'should ' be +10 trouble free years of daily use.

SSD’s are a great upgrade to older platter based drives. So much faster, don’t need defragmenting (if anyone is defragging an SSD, stop!) I don’t know offhand of SSD’s having bad “sectors” from the factory, but the biggest killer of solid state drives is writing to them. You will see something called TBW in the specs, which is how many terabytes the drive can handle have written to it before the chips fail. The chips are essentially tiny switches (0 or 1) and eventually wear out with repeated switching.

I always use solid state drives for my OS as it isn’t written to much, and platter drives for mass storage that don’t need fast speeds.

With solid state drives, I’d backup with greater frequency due to that limitation.

[GregC]

Usually what messes up a hard drive, whether SSD or platter drive, is interrupting the write process by shutting off the device during writes. Doesn’t matter, though during reads. They’re pretty robust physically, able to take up to 100s of g-force load.

had my Kronos2 61 riding with me for a couple years. Still running strong.

That seems to make sense. When I google my question, what I read is that its normal to have a few bad sectors on SSD.

Its when the bad sectors start to increase, for whatever reason, is when the SSD gets problematic.

I think there might be some wisdom to having a 2 SSD set up in Kronos.

My factory SSD is the OS boot drive. I do all my recording and file creation on a much larger 2nd SSD.
This is probably over cautious.

The standard for a factory SSD 'should ' be +10 trouble free years of daily use.

SSD’s are a great upgrade to older platter based drives. So much faster, don’t need defragmenting (if anyone is defragging an SSD, stop!) I don’t know offhand of SSD’s having bad “sectors” from the factory, but the biggest killer of solid state drives is writing to them. You will see something called TBW in the specs, which is how many terabytes the drive can handle have written to it before the chips fail. The chips are essentially tiny switches (0 or 1) and eventually wear out with repeated switching.

I always use solid state drives for my OS as it isn’t written to much, and platter drives for mass storage that don’t need fast speeds.

With solid state drives, I’d backup with greater frequency due to that limitation.

Thats good info and more reassuring.

I was attempting to build more context and accuracy of what to do when a Kronos provides ambiguous error messages.

I am under the impression that SSD failure is quite rare or unusual. I do recall a few owners [ over several yrs] stating their K had a bad SSD.

Anyway, the Korg service centers likely have some data on problematic components.

[decreebass]

Dang. Sorry to hear that, TC. I've only had one time at the VERY end of the night where my K261 suddenly stopped outputting sound randomly. I just switched combis and came back and it was working again, but it was a head-scratcher.

I still have confidence in it, though

My K288 at home still has no issues.

[Sweat]

I have gigged my original K73 very hard for 8 years, so it has a LOT of scratches and war wounds. It is a tank and a beast, but a sensitive machine. Like many, I have also been embarrassed occasionally with my share of OS shut-down/reboot problems. I have often had to re-seat the memory sticks and other components that have come loose from travelling thousands of miles in bouncing trailers across country.

I always had the idea of keeping it safe in my home studio, taking my Mainstage laptop on gigs. However, the K is too convenient not to use live, so I do whatever is needed to ensure it is as reliable as possible. I have become spoiled with instant access to the thousands of sounds. Incredibly low latency, and tight integration with the control surface. With the ability to pull up and instantly stream high quality, muli-gigibyte library of sounds I have loaded on my second SSD, can anyone tell me of another rig that can compete with it? Even software?

[Xenophile]

Since I've got about another 5 or 6 months on the extended warranty, I guess I'll take it to the nearby authorized Korg repair shop and have them try to reproduce the failure. It is very unpredictable, though. It wouldn't surprise me if they keep it on for 2 weeks and it never crashes, and then I get it back and have it crash again on the next gig.

For what these things cost, stability should be bullet-proof.

[GregC]

Since I've got about another 5 or 6 months on the extended warranty, I guess I'll take it to the nearby authorized Korg repair shop and have them try to reproduce the failure. It is very unpredictable, though. It wouldn't surprise me if they keep it on for 2 weeks and it never crashes, and then I get it back and have it crash again on the next gig.

For what these things cost, stability should be bullet-proof.

I agree , Kronos should not be quirky, troublesome like this.

I would be disappointed if your auth service center is not thorough

Your details of the issue should be adequate. Everyone knows intermittent issues are a problem. Untreated they become bigger problems.

[Bertotti]

Sorry if I missed this in the thread somewhere but my Kronos X 61 had a similar issue, reseated things it seemed t work but slowly had some issues same errors as your occasionally. In the end, I put my Kronos through a battery back up surge suppressor. Under 100$ and I haven't had any errors in the last several years since I started using. I'm in the states and thought I had good power but apparently, something was causing an issue with the line power at some point.

[GregC]

Sorry if I missed this in the thread somewhere but my Kronos X 61 had a similar issue, reseated things it seemed t work but slowly had some issues same errors as your occasionally. In the end, I put my Kronos through a battery back up surge suppressor. Under 100$ and I haven't had any errors in the last several years since I started using. I'm in the states and thought I had good power but apparently, something was causing an issue with the line power at some point.

O/p stated he is using a UPS from the very beginning. Thus the error messages are not external power related with his K.