Korg Forums

[DeeZaal]

Hello all,

I have a Korg Kross 88PT which I have had since August '16.
If I use the headphone jack, the sounds seems rather quiet even with the volume turned up to max.

This happens regardless of the headphones I use.

So I decided to get a Mono L/R to 3.5mm adaptor to use my pc speakers which only have a 3.5mm connector.

Even when using these through the mono L/R jacks, it seems far quieter than I would expect.

Some sounds like soft organ sounds are barely audible.

And I have noticed that the extreme high and low keys have a sort of "thud-like" echo to them regardless of using headphones or speakers.

Do these Kross workstations have internal SD cards like the Krome and Kronos? If so could this be faulty?

I bought this online from a store in Scotland so I can't just pop to the store to have them check it.

Any suggestions or further triage I can do?

Thanks.

[OpAmp]

Hi,

Do you get the same behaviour using the L/R outputs at the back of the Kross?
Can you reproduce it with a factory built in program? If yes, which one? So that people here can try it at home as well.

In general the headphone output is not hot, which is fine, you don't want to blow your ears. Personally I did not have any issues so far using a headphone about sounds barely hearable.

Bye.
_________________
microKORGXL, Kaossilator Pro, monotribe, SQ-1, volca fm, Kross 88 BK
Alesis SR18, Akai Miniak, Fender Strat, Line 6 Spider II 112, Zoom MS-50G

[DeeZaal]

Hi OpAmp,

Thanks for replying, I went and bought a set of dedicated monitor headphones last night in a last ditch attempt and the weak sound disappeared completely and now the headphone jack produces nice, strong sounds which can even begin to get uncomfortable if played hard with volume on max.

The only issue that remains is the sound made at the upper end of the keybed, when playing high notes, it sounds as though when recording the pianos (all string pianos, no other voices) they had someone smack the strings with a piece of pvc tubing, giving a dull, hollow sound behind the note when played.

Does anyone else experience this?

I have tried with speakers, but using an l/r mono to 3.5mm adaptor into some cheap 2.1 pc speakers as its all I have for now. Sound is poor but after seeing the difference with dedicated monitor headphones I suspect this is just due to cheap speakers not the keyboard itself.

Thanks

[OpAmp]

Hi DeeZaal,

I started to listen carefully to my Kross using a headphone to the pianos in the high register. I hear it as well.

At first I thought it was due to the MasterFx (some reverb), but switching it off did not help.
I created my own program for test using the pianosamples and yes, you can clearly hear that in the upper registers the quality of the sample is a bit poor, with by default some reverb like effect on it on the recording of the sample itself.

It is a bit a bummer. In some cases I even hear some aliasing (volume at max).
I also discovered that although the Kross Engine supports 4 different velocity switched samples for a note, the Kross seems to come only with 3 stereo samples for the piano for different velocities.

Anyway, it could be interesting in this case to load your own piano sample. And this is possible, but not supported or documented officially by Korg. Because they deliver Kross boards with oriental sounds where the samples are loaded from an SD Card delivered by Korg...

Bye
_________________
microKORGXL, Kaossilator Pro, monotribe, SQ-1, volca fm, Kross 88 BK
Alesis SR18, Akai Miniak, Fender Strat, Line 6 Spider II 112, Zoom MS-50G

[DeeZaal]

Hi OpAmp,

Greatly appreciate you checking yours for this, I'm glad that it's deliberate, as annoying as it might be, it's not a fault. I had the guy at the music store check the demo Kross and he confirmed it happens with that too.

Where is the best place to find this information about uploading custom sounds? and where would be the best place to get some?

Cheers

[OpAmp]

Hi,

There is no official site or official software allowing it.
Few months ago I searched the net and found some vague youtube movies in Spanish or Portugese. I did not understand it. I tried to replicate is via some downloads and prepare an SD card. Unfortunately my board simply ignored the special files on th SD Card. So assume the Kross must be set into a special mode to load at startup the samples from the SD card using some hidden key combination.

As there is no official documentation, how to do it, what it exactly does, whether you can reverse it, or whatever, I was a bit hesitating to try it out.
It's possible, that is for sure.

Bye.
_________________
microKORGXL, Kaossilator Pro, monotribe, SQ-1, volca fm, Kross 88 BK
Alesis SR18, Akai Miniak, Fender Strat, Line 6 Spider II 112, Zoom MS-50G

[dfahrner]

It is possible to load samples into the Kross from the SD card, and it works exactly like the Krome - you put the META.IMG and SAMPLE.IMG files (specifically generated for the Kross) in the root directory of the SD card, and they are automatically loaded at power on...to use my old vibraphone samples in a Krome, I had made .IMG files using Kromatic software, and then using KSTool V2.0.0, converted them to Kross .IMG files...they load correctly into my Kross, and the multisamples can then be used in programs...send me a PM and I'll send you these files to try out...

I also tried to load some Kross .IMG files that I found online, and some work and some don't (?). As you say, it's not easy to understand the process, there's no official support, hardly any documentation, the YouTube videos are in Spanish, etc., etc...and as for loading new piano samples, there probably isn't enough room in the Kross memory to do that - it's not clear whether there is 8 or 16MB available (the SAMPLE.IMG file is 8MB, but may be compressed)...my vibraphone samples are looped, but with four velocity levels and four samples per octave, they still take up almost 4MB; good piano samples could easily be an order of magnitude bigger...

df

(Update: These Kross sample files are now available on the Facebook "Korg Sample Tools" group file page.)