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Kronos discontinued?


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I wonder if they're working on a new high-end workstation, or if the Nautilus is going to be their high-end workstation for the forseeable future.

 

I"d like to hope so. But with chip shortages and market trends, who knows? The Nautilus could be a way to drop the price of a Kronos without pissing off Kronos owners. Which could pave the way for a successor. I wonder if they will come out with a Nautilus 2 in a few years with aftertouch and 9 assignable sliders.

 

It is 8 months since this thread started and so far nothing from Korg.

 

According to Sweetwater, Korg has spoken.

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When I got my Kronos it was almost ideal. Sampling and file management was too convoluted but I learned. After these years have passed it is now about 20-25 pounds too heavy. I'm not as stout as I used to be.

"It doesn't have to be difficult to be cool" - Mitch Towne

 

"A great musician can bring tears to your eyes!!!

So can a auto Mechanic." - Stokes Hunt

 

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There's a guy whose videos I like and in one of his recent videos explaining differences in type of keyboards he starts saying.... workstations not as popular as in the past. That a lot of people who used to use workstations are now using computers and DAWs and libraries.

 

I think he's right libraries and VSTs have come a long way and for typical user, digital sounds are part of the world of "good enough". Composers were a big part of the workstation market seems I see fewer composers sitting at a workstation anymore. Even for performance how many even here are using a computing device for sounds, set management, etc that might of used a workstation in the past. Maybe the day of the big workstation is over and smaller performance focused keyboards the big market.

 

UPDATE:

My Sweetwater salesman just got back to me and said the Kronos is discontinued and Nautilus is now it. I don't know if I agree with all the things he said were better about Nautilus, but Kronos is dead long live Nautilus.

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Maybe the day of the big workstation is over and smaller performance focused keyboards the big market.

 

I can still see the workstation's continuing usage by gigging musicians, just due to the huge library of sounds inside of them, not so much for sequencing and recording purposes.

 

As soon as Nord (et al) get sound libraries inside of them that are as massive and comprehensive as the workstations, the workstations will still be highly useful for gigging musicians who need to have an arsenal of sounds at their fingertips (not just the bread & butter sounds), without the hassle of hooking up a laptop.

Kurzweil PC3, Yamaha MOX8, Alesis Ion, Kawai K3M
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Maybe the day of the big workstation is over and smaller performance focused keyboards the big market.

 

I can still see the workstation's continuing usage by gigging musicians, just due to the huge library of sounds inside of them, not so much for sequencing and recording purposes.

 

As soon as Nord (et al) get sound libraries inside of them that are as massive and comprehensive as the workstations, the workstations will still be highly useful for gigging musicians who need to have an arsenal of sounds at their fingertips (not just the bread & butter sounds), without the hassle of hooking up a laptop.

 

The Kronos is good for gigging musicians who do a lot of covers. So Korg shouldn"t abandon those folks. Sweetwater is offering 48 month financing on the Kronos. I"ve never seen them offer that before. And they are giving bonus bucks for purchases of the 61 note and 73 note models, but not the LS 88.

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Soapboxing a bit on the 'death' of workstation keyboards â¦

 

It was predicted several years ago, but there were ergonomic factors that laptops could not provide, so workstations are still with us. They are still with us but nearly as numerous. A frequent form factor I see is a competent dedicated keyboard (say piano or organ) mated with a laptop or tablet. The same forces which are applying pressure on workstations are also causing them to better at what they do. So we should expect workstations to be less frequent in number and more beloved by the people who love them: a shrinking pool of ever more enthusiastic fans.

 

One insight I wish manufacturers would understand is that professional build quality is still something gigging musicians desire. Many of us would rather not pay in weight and $ for a pile of bloatware (from our changing perspective) in order to have a well built instrument.

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I came late to the Kronos party and ended up with a 73 (76?), whereas I'd prefer an 88. Got it used for a pretty decent price. That said, I really like the machine and still may go for an 88 at some point in the future...used, obviously. It'd be nice if it stayed in production, but that's the way things go.

 

No, I haven't looked at the current product. If I get serious about trying to find an 88 key Korg, I'll do my homework, at least to the extent I'm able. Where I live there are no Korgs available to test drive...not even the cheap ones.

 

Grey

I'm not interested in someone's ability to program. I'm interested in their ability to compose and play.

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Maybe it's just me, but any workstation with less than 9 faders seems liked a gimped instrument. Hammond Organ is one of the "big 4" of modern music: Piano, EPiano, Synthesizer, Organ. Without 9 drawbars, you pretty much knock out that instrument from its conventional playability. Why manufacturer's haven't approached it that way, I just don't understand. To me it's as bad as creating a piano without a sustain pedal.

 

For that reason alone, even though the Nautilus is "almost a Kronos", it knocks it pretty far down.

Puck Funk! :)

 

Equipment: Laptop running lots of nerdy software, some keyboards, noise makersâ¦yada yada yadaâ¦maybe a cat?

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I can still see the workstation's continuing usage by gigging musicians, just due to the huge library of sounds inside of them, not so much for sequencing and recording purposes.

...though the thing that most defines a board as a workstation are those sequencing and/or recording functions, i.e. the ability to create a complete linear multitrack composition completely within the unit. Which is why Montage and Fantom are not typically called "workstations," while their predecessors were.

 

I don't so much mind the dearth of real-time controls on the Nautilus, because to be honest, I didn't like the Kronos' usability in this department very much anyway (meaning if that were my priority, I'd probably have looked elsewhere anyway, if they weren't going to improve on it). And just to get some basic additional control if you still need it (e.g. for drawbars, as Eric mentioned), there's space for a NanoKontrol or whatever. But for Korg's top gigging board to not have aftertouch is kind of shocking. Those have always had AT, going back to the M1 (or even earlier). I guess there's the Pa4X and PA1000, which are great boards, but of a different type.

Maybe this is the best place for a shameless plug! Our now not-so-new new video at https://youtu.be/3ZRC3b4p4EI is a 40 minute adaptation of T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock" - check it out! And hopefully I'll have something new here this year. ;-)

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I have a totally different issue: fading eye power for mini lettering of any kind and big ol' octave-and-a-half grand piano hands. The crossover between those two makes pecking away at an iPad-sized GUI on a workstation seem torturous.

 

Those displays and (surely) many underlying system demands leave me cold. Give me just a few more strategic knobs overall and OLEDs that are maybe a mere doubling of the size we usually see. They banish my negatory on touchscreens with their impressive clarity. Its one of the best improvements to come along in ages.

 

I don't know how pricey an OLED might be on a parts cost list, nor do I know the possible limitations on their sizes. My opinion is simply based on Me. OLEDs let you get back to more traditional "knob playing" without giving up the huge gains of an accommodating display.

 

Korg's Wavestate needs a larger one for all that its doing, but Nord has it nearly perfect. Therefore, NORD LEAD.

 "I want to be an intellectual, but I don't have the brainpower.
  The absent-mindedness, I've got that licked."
        ~ John Cleese

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I wonder if they're working on a new high-end workstation, or if the Nautilus is going to be their high-end workstation for the forseeable future.

Hopefully the former, although I don't have high expectations for anything too foreseeable. Not a perfect analogy, but perhaps like the Jupiter-80 was Roland's flagship "placeholder" until the new Fantoms came along.

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

- George Bernard Shaw

 

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I feel the Nautilus is a stop gap. $3k+ 10 year old flagship is a slow seller. We need to react rapidly to the changing market. Doing a new flagship is always risky and requires both time and money. Better to take the Kronos, focus on what the majority of customers want from it and get it to market under $3k.

Yamaha CP88, Casio PX-560

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Maybe it's just me, but any workstation with less than 9 faders seems liked a gimped instrument. Hammond Organ is one of the "big 4" of modern music: Piano, EPiano, Synthesizer, Organ. Without 9 drawbars, you pretty much knock out that instrument from its conventional playability. Why manufacturer's haven't approached it that way, I just don't understand. To me it's as bad as creating a piano without a sustain pedal.

 

For that reason alone, even though the Nautilus is "almost a Kronos", it knocks it pretty far down.

 

Agree.

 

But for Korg's top gigging board to not have aftertouch is kind of shocking. Those have always had AT, going back to the M1 (or even earlier). I guess there's the Pa4X and PA1000, which are great boards, but of a different type.

 

Agree as well.

 

I could see Korg coming out with the Nautilus 2 with both AT and 9 sliders. But the Kronos has to be gone first.

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The writing has been on the wall on the Kronos for a long time - pretty much just a couple paint jobs over the last 6 years- the Kronos 2 in 2015 was the last meaningful update, and even that was back-ported to the original 2011 Kronos. I"ve been on the OASYS/Kronos platform since 2005 and they have been simply untouchable in terms of raw power that whole time. There are other boards with different and arguably better workflows, but it"s hard to argue about raw power. The Nautilus is undeniably a lesser instrument. I do think Korg will go around again, and in another 12-24 months enough time might have passed to not piss off people that just bought a Nautilus for it to make sense to release something that"s a worthy Kronos successor.

 

In the meantime, I picked up a Roland Fantom 7. For the most part I really really like it. I never did much with the audio tracks on the Kronos, and the basic Roland workflow is reasonably intuitive, and they do a nice job of the stuff that most people care about for a gigging board. 20+ years ago I loved my XP-80; it"s fun to be back with an all-in-one keyboard appliance - something I never quite got to with the Kronos because I didn"t like its piano sound, so out came the audio interface and laptop. The Roland VPiano is nicely balanced and well-behaved for sitting in an ensemble mix (it took a bit of experimentation with velocity curves and other settings to feel good to me, but I got there).

 

The development arc of the Fantom is interesting - I watched it with interest when it was announced in 2019, but it was so half-finished I walked away - remembering stories of Roland making promises and then abandoning previous Fantom generations. After another round of frustration at Korg not doing anything interesting and feeling a round of GAS, I took a look at the Fantom again in October. To my surprise, they fixed 95% of what was missing that I cared about - sampling and as of this past summer, a passable tone wheel organ. There are still some limitations - VPiano doesn"t support seamless patch changes, the LFOs don"t tempo sync, the sequencer is still only a groove box with maximum of 32-bar sections, but it now does most of what I need it to do.

 

It will be interesting to see if Roland continues with updates to the Fantom. There"s a pretty universal wish list to fix what"s missing.

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I'm probably like a lot of you in that workstations really cover a ton of ground for doing covers--yet I have never used the "workstation" features. I began sequencing on macs in the late 80s (Vision!) and have never desired to do it on a keyboard other than dabbling at a few Eminence Front-style noodlings to play along with. I sequenced the beginning of "Why Can't this be Love" on my Poly 800 for gigging, I think that may be the last one I did :)

 

The performance-oriented boards like Nord Stage, Hammond sk pro etc make more sense for what I do, but they typically lack the flexibility and/or engines in some regard (or in the case of the Stage, are very expensive.) I haven't yet seen the perfect keyboard for me personally--especially once cost, weight and action preference comes into it--but certainly there are some good ones out there that get really close!

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The Fantom essentially copied the control layout of the OASYS including the LED ladders. Swapping between part levels and organ drawbars is easy, though the organ drawbars don't support "catch" mode - when you touch a slider that's in a different position than software, the drawbar jumps to where the slider is. Other than that, I think they did a great job of producing a really accessible board for live work, and the Scene Chain mode does about 90% of what SetList mode does on the Kronos - again great for live work.

 

I also like the build quality - super solid metal construction. The Kronos is spongy feeling. To be fair one of my Kronoses is from 2013 and it's as good as new, but the Fantom is reassuringly metal and reminds me a lot of the bullet-proof XP-80 still holding down a stand in my basement.

 

The other performance boards like the Yamaha YC and the Nerd Stage have some attractiveness if you are 90% piano and organ, but I need more than that. The Fantom is a nice compromise between the geeky Kronos and the much simpler stage boards.

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I also like the build quality - super solid metal construction. The Kronos is spongy feeling. To be fair

The other performance boards like the Yamaha YC and the Nerd Stage have some attractiveness if you are 90% piano and organ, but I need more than that. The Fantom is a nice compromise between the geeky Kronos and the much simpler stage boards.

 

Is Nautilus also spongy feeling or is built better than Kronos?

Yamaha P-515, Korg SV-2 73, Kurzweil PC4-7

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Hello, I have the Nautilus 61 and really like it . I thought the Krome was a little spongy perhaps, and although OT and a digital piano the SP280 was defineitly over the edge for me. I am happy with the price point of the Nautilus- what I would prefer would have been a XLR input- I used my credits for a SM58 and am getting hum with it so am really just using my Presonus/computer for vocals.
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I suspect that Korg stripped the Nautilus down to the most essential workstation features a songwriter/composer KB player might need.

 

Otherwise, most younger musos are into computer-based recording and/or dedicated hardware grooveboxes.

 

IMO, that ship known as Kronos has sailed. It has been replaced by a yacht called Nautilus. :cool:

PD

 

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return."--E. Ahbez "Nature Boy"

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I agree- I feel as though they sold to as many people they could in the $3k range and came up with something that starts in the $2k range. Although I was never a great fan of recording on the PC, as PC's have improved and with the workflow of Arturia's KeyLab MKii I am enjoying the DAW more now.
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Kronos is spongy in the bottom of the key travel because of aftertouch. If the Nautilus has aftertouch it probably feels the same. But that"s just me.

"It doesn't have to be difficult to be cool" - Mitch Towne

 

"A great musician can bring tears to your eyes!!!

So can a auto Mechanic." - Stokes Hunt

 

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  • 1 month later...
2 hours ago, pawelsz said:

Kronos has just been moved to product archives on Korg website.

Not suprised.  The Nautlius sounds and plays just like it. 😎

PD

 

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return."--E. Ahbez "Nature Boy"

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Based upon their recent trend of keyboard flagship names, Im calling the next generation of performance based workstation, like the Montage, the KORG ZEUS! 

Yamaha MODX8, Korg Kronos 2 61, Hammond B3, Novation 61SL MKII, Impulse 61, Roland D-550, Proteus 2000, etc......to name a few.
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Well, with the release of the Nautilus, I doubt we'll see a new workstation anytime soon.  My Kronos is really getting long in the tooth and I fear I'll be forced to pick up an alternative.  The Nautilus doesn't work for me.  The lack of realtime controls on the Nautilus strikes it off my list for a new board.  And, for the love of God, the Nautilus 61 and 73 just looks plain awful.  What the hell were they thinking with that design.  Hope I'm wrong and Korg releases a new workstation in June, but I'm not holding my breath.

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The Nautilus is basically a Kronos with a new coat with less buttons on it.  Internally the Nautilus still has the 10 year old Kronos internals, sure a few interface changes and a few updated sounds, but basically the same.     So another article I read posted is Korg going to do another workstation.  Workstations appear to dying out even Roland and Yamaha competition Montage/MoDX and Fantom are branded synthesizers not workstations. 

As the article pointed out more are using computers and devices instead of workstations.   So how much of a workstation market is there anymore.  Something to ponder over breakfast (or whatever meal time it is where you live.)

 

 

 

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