Kaossilator 2 Power Problem

[Bald Eagle]

My Kaossilator 2 will not power on with either batteries or the power adapter. It's only 2 months old and had been working fine. I took it back to Sam Ash where I purchased it and they will take care of repair or replacement as it is still under warranty.

However, they said that I may have fried it because I used the A/C adapter with the batteries in. I have never heard of this being a problem. So the question is ... Do you really have to remove the batteries when using the power adapter?

In any case I may just sell it when I get it back as I really don't have much use for it.

[xmlguy]

Nope, just another Sam Ash nincompoop giving asinine reasons to get out of actually doing their job. The only thing more idiotic would be if some manufacturer actually did have their engineering so screwed up that you would fry the thing by hooking an A/C adapter while batteries were inserted, but that would certainly become a mandatory recall and class-action suit in nearly every jurisdiction in the world were it was sold.

So, no, you don't have to remove the batteries of ANYTHING before plugging in an A/C adapter that it was designed to use.

[Bald Eagle]

Thanks for the feedback xmlguy.

I guess it was just a defective KO2 unit that was near failure to begin with.

On a side note sounds like you don't like the folks over at Sam Ash. They are just doing their jobs for the most part so I don't find too much fault with them not knowing many details. For me they are nearby if I need something quick they are pretty helpful. But the best service I have found is from Sweetwater.

[xmlguy]

The person isn't doing their job when they have no valid reason to blame the customer for improper use and not immediately process the warrantee claim, as it is their job to do. They have no electronics education or knowledge to make such a lame excuse when they are unqualified to determine the cause of failure. It doesn't matter where the employee works. That's a universally lame excuse. Unfortunately, my experience is that the average music gear store employee is no more knowledgeable about what they sell than anyone walking in off the street looking for a minimum wage job, and few of them have any interest to improve their knowledge after they're hired. There might be exceptions to this rule, but I never happen to meet the exceptional ones at the Sam Ash and Guitar Centers near me. Actually, my local Best Buy Music Gear store has better qualified staff, but I think it's because their staff are required to conduct the free music lessons that they do on certain instrument purchases. The Best Buy staff also seem to have less employee turnover in the music gear section, but I'm not sure why. Only a selection of Best Buy stores have music gear departments (store in a store concept), so I'm not talking about the average Best Buy store and staff, which are typically incompetent like most electronic stores that hire at minimum wage for floor sales staff. I've seen employee quality rapidly degrade over the last 20 years at GC and SA music gear stores.

I can't even tolerate shopping for gear in most stores because there's almost always some idiot commissioned employee blathering some BS just to rack up the ticket price for a customer. As soon as they break out the Monster Cable BS then I just have to leave or feel compelled to start slashing the BS by exposing it all.

[Happy Jack]

My Kaossilator 2 will not power on with either batteries or the power adapter. It's only 2 months old and had been working fine...(snipped some)....

Hi, Bald Eagle.

Mine went the same way, identical fault, just two weeks left of the 12 months' warrantee. I was getting ready to sell it and had just tried to power it up before boxing it up for sale.

Contacted dealer (TotalMusic) Ebay - UK, and they said post it back no problem. Got it back from Korg UK ten days' later all fixed, no charge.

Korg included a Service Report, which states:

FAULT: Not powering up. CAUSE: Power switch had come unsoldered. ACTION: Resoldered switch, Updated OS, Tested OK. COMMENTS: General wear and tear.

TotalMusic (Ebay UK) are doing a special on the Kaossilator 2 for £105 UK Pounds with a free 5-year warrantee! Reading the small print of the offered 5-year warantee as above, I see this:

(quote): **The warranty does not cover accidental faults or wear and tear." (unquote)

So would that be the "wear and tear" that caused my Kaossilator 2's power switch to be suddently unsoldered? : - )

As a footnote, am now keeping the Kaossilator 2. Been gleaning lots of tips from this website plus trawling good stuff from the "Higher Manual" found on the web. Like to use it fed into the aux' in of my main keyboard.

cheers

[Bald Eagle]

I'll have to see what the resolution on mine is when I get it back. I'll post the results then.

I also want wanted to feed it into the input of a M3. The thing is that I already have a KPro on a second M3 so adding the KO2 doesn't do a lot for me which is why I'm considering selling it. I'm also considering the iKaossilator and just using the ipad instead. I originally got the KO2 for portability and I usually have my ipad with me now anyway.

[xmlguy]

The iMS-20 app is better than the Kaossilator Pro or iKaossilator in one critical regard: iMS-20 programs are fully programmable and the others aren't. There's also a large library of programs accumulating for iMS-20 on SoundCloud. Actually, iMS-20 has 2 Kaoss Pads, the right one is for notes and gate time (you can set the scale/key), and the left one can be assigned to various parameters for the XY axis.

[Bald Eagle]

The iMS-20 app is better than the Kaossilator Pro or iKaossilator in one critical regard: iMS-20 programs are fully programmable and the others aren't. There's also a large library of programs accumulating for iMS-20 on SoundCloud. Actually, iMS-20 has 2 Kaoss Pads, the right one is for notes and gate time (you can set the scale/key), and the left one can be assigned to various parameters for the XY axis.

I just bought the iMS-20 last week but haven't gotten to deep into it yet. I didn't realize you could get patches for it from SoundCloud ... pretty cool.

[xmlguy]

I just bought the iMS-20 last week but haven't gotten to deep into it yet. I didn't realize you could get patches for it from SoundCloud ... pretty cool.

Yep, you sure can! It isn't obvious, but you can easily sample play projects from SoundSound and then download the ones you like. Every project contains one or more patterns and each pattern can have a different synth patch that can be named whatever the designer wanted it to be called. You can then save any one of those programs to your own patch library, either keeping the given name or renaming it. So one project could easily have 16 different patches for you to add to your own library. Also note that it's possible for two or more different patches to have the same name, particularly if the author modified an existing patch without renaming it. So you may need to listen to the patch and look at the parameters to see if two patches with the same name are the same or different.

[Bald Eagle]

I guess I will never know what the problem was. Sam Ash decided to just give me a new one and deal with the defective one with no other explanation. No complaints from me so I'll just hope it doesn't happen again.

[xmlguy]

I'm glad the retailer came through for you.