Nord Piano 5 incoming

[ElmerJFudd]

Korg also uses Rasberry Pi in their Wavestate and Modwave. I"m sure more are coming.

[16251]

Thanks for the warning.

[mauriziodececco]

As an IT professional with a past in computer music, my impression is that technological platform discussed in this thread that gave Nord the leadership in the 2000's is starting to be, or is already, a liability more than a technological advantage; as said above, platforms like a Raspeberry Pi or equivalent architectures based on off the shelf components give you plenty of power, RAM, and disk thruput for very low cost and complexity.

This is was always happend in IT: specific, exotic architectures giving you a strong technology advantage at a give moment do not attire the kind of investiment that allows standard of the shelf architecture to progress.

The results is that any custom solution that is good today will be obsolete and a liability after a given time; in the 90s (at Ircam) i met people building dedicated hardware for making sample streaming from disk; not many years later it was cheaper to do with a PC.

 

All the sample based Nord Instruments are still doing well because they sound good, and the ergonomic of the instrument is especially adapted to a market segment; but what it will happen when another vendor will came out with something with ten or one hundred time the memory space for sample (the Prophet X has already that kind of sample libraries) ?

 

On the other side, the Nord Lead was special and unique a few years ago, now the knobby synth market reborn from its ashes.

 

I love my Nord, and i seriously hope Nord is preparing a new generation of instruments for the 2020's ....

 

Maurizio

[AnotherScott]

This is was always happend in IT: specific, exotic architectures giving you a strong technology advantage at a give moment do not attire the kind of investiment that allows standard of the shelf architecture to progress.

Similarly, if you go back around 40 years, Commodore and Atari offered much better graphics and audio performance than Apple, because they supplemented their 6502/68000 processors with custom sound and graphics chips, whereas Apple used the 6502/68000 for everything. But as processors got increasingly faster, Commodore and Atari got somewhat bottlenecked because their custom chips didn't scale.