Korg Forums

[nikolay]

My M50 88 keys is finally here

It was a long wait - I ordered it on 10 of October, the store got it on 22nd and sent it via UPS the same day and I got it this morning (30 of October).

The 61 keys version was available in both stores I checked, but the 88 keys was problematic - a sales person from one of the stores told me that they are expecting only three M50-88 while there are five backorders and Korg is going to send them the next bulk of M50-88 around February - March next year. According to the same guy there were only 10 pieces for the whole Germany and they managed to get 3 of them as they are one of the biggest stores there. Either he was wrong or I was lucky to get from another store one of the remaining 7

I have already spent almost 12 hours playing and experimenting with my new toy and I am pretty happy with this purchase

My wife likes it, which is also a good sign (at least I don't feel guilty spending money on this toy)

The build quality seems pretty good and I am surprised that the top/back panel (and actually almost the whole case) is of some kind of a metal. I expected everything to be of plastic as it is a relativley cheap entry level synth and this was a nice surprise indeed, although it definetly adds to the total weight. This might be for the 88 keys version only, I haven't seen a 61 keys version - might be more "plastic" to keep the weight low.

The thing I don't like is the grayscale LCD - has slightly annoying dark vertical lines common for this type of LCD. They are visible depending on the contrast setting and the angle you look at the screen, so if you push the contrast a bit and do not move while looking at the screen they are not that much visible and annoying.

The operating system was version 1.0.1 and I upgraded it to version 1.0.3 from the Korg web site. Pretty easy and fast process, but I was a bit nervous to not break my new toy

The screen calibration also worked without a problem. I have read another topic in this forum saying that the scren calibration has made the synth screen unusable and had a long discussion with myself whether to do this calibration, but after upgrading to 1.0.3 without a problem I decided to give it a try and it worked as well.

The software works well on Win XP and Vista 32, I will try it on Vista 64 as well as I plan to use Vista 64 for my DAW.

On Vista I had to force windows to use the Korg MIDI driver, as M50 seems to be class compliant and Vista automatically installs a generic MIDI driver so you can use M50 as a MIDI keyboard through the USB connection without installing any software. Unfortunately, the generic driver has notable latency and it is really needed to force the installation of the Korg USB-MIDI driver. This is actually described in the installation manual, but I usually read these afterwards