My Poly800 just got company from a Kronos X Zebrano... :)

[TheWolf]

For the most of you, this news will very likely vastly less exciting than the release of the new OS. But for me, it is the opposite: My good old Poly800 just got company from a Kronos 88 X Zebrano.

The first impression when I saw the boxed thing for the first time as the kind guys of the local music dealer loaded it into my car: a Volkswagen Lupo is much larger from the inside than it looks from the outside. The Kronos, a pair of new monitors plus stands for everything snugly fit the car from front to rear, from left to right and from top to bottom -- and there was even a bit if free space left behind the steering wheel for the driver!

The second impression when I had to unload the car and carry everything upstairs all by myself: heavy, très heavy. And no, we do not have a problem with gravitational pull here. But I managed without dropping anything or getting it wet in the pouring rain.

The third impression when the Kronos was finally mounted on its stand: it looks great. The wooden side panels give it the air of classiness, stability and robustness I am expecting from a music workstation of this calibre. On the right side of the top panel, just below the Kronos logo, there is a sticker informing anyone who wants to know that my machine is item number 015 of the limited, 50 years Korg anniversary Zebrano edition. No hand signed certificate, however... tse! The serial number is a little bit greater than 130000, so unless Korg is playing games with a region encoding numbering scheme, the Kronos has been selling well, it seems.

The fourth impression after switching it on: the fan is noisy -- but not unbearably so. The clunking noises of the keyboard hammers are far more louder. And what a feeling: compared to my Poly800, the RH3 keyboard is the pure bliss! Apparently there has been some progress during the last 30 years...

The fifth impression after spending hours and hours doodling around with the factory sounds, sometimes in combination with the MIDI slaved and audio fed-in Poly800: fantastic! But my aching back definitively wants me to buy a better chair.

So, what next? Upgrading the OS and then delving and digging deeply into this music machine and brushing up my dilapidated keyboard playing technique. Sooner or later, I'll have to buy some accompanying computer which brings CSound and external sequencers and all the other gimmicks into the game. Currently, my Linux laptop will have to serve for this purpose.

So much for the moment. More to come later -- most probably lots of questions. But I promise, I'll consult the manuals first...

[Yuma]

Congratulations with your special Zebrano-version of the Kronos.
I'm sure you'll have lots of fun in exploring this beast of an instrument!

[TheWolf]

Thanks! For some reason, going to work tomorrow seems strangely unappealing...

At the moment, the most attractive features of the Kronos is to me its ability to upgrade the OS and the firmware. My good old Poly800 seems to be an early model with the MIDI OMNI firmware bug -- but short of physically replacing the ROM chip with one of a later model or inserting a hardware MIDI filter between the two machines, there seems to be no way to fix it.

And I'll definitively buy a stylus for the touch screen. As nice as big hands are for playing large chords on the piano, as difficult it is for me to hit the tiny controls on the screen at the first go. And yes, I have (re-)calibrated the screen several times. But hitting the centre of the two rectangles is already difficult enough if even the tips of my small fingers more than just cover the whole rectangles completely.