Korg D1 on Sale; Sequel Possibly on the Way

[CHarrell]

1 hour ago, Paul Woodward said:

Way ahead as in?

I think the GS is a great board and reviews of it were very positive, they also haven’t really replaced it with anything.

 

It seems like a really cool product but I think people really wanted an SV2.

[ProfD]

58 minutes ago, CHarrell said:

It seems like a really cool product but I think people really wanted an SV2.

 

Bingo. 

 

IMO, while the Grandstage had the right form factor, it sounded like a best of Kronos sounds in a DP. 

 

The Korg SV has its own vibe.  I preferred the SV for DP sounds over the Kronos/Grandstage.😎

[AnotherScott]

4 hours ago, ProfD said:

Yamaha and Roland are way ahead of Korg when it comes to DPs.😎

4 hours ago, Paul Woodward said:

Way ahead as in?

 

I've never played the Grandstage, but up until when the GS came out, I hadn't heard any Korg pianos that I thought were really great, e.g. I wasn't enamored of the Kronos/Kronos 2 pianos, or SV1 (hardly alone there). But I really like the Italian model in the XE20 (which I'm guessing is the same or at least similar to the Italian piano in the GS, Nautilus, B2, B2N...?). Up until then, I'd have put Yamaha ahead.

 

I still can't really warm to Roland pianos. They always seem to have an exaggerated tonal range to me. A lot of people have commented on their sounding bright or even metallic, but I think it's not just how bright they are at higher velocities, but how much brighter they are there than at the low velocities. That is, the amount of tonal variation from pp to ff seems greater than on an acoustic piano, which makes it less realistic to me.

 

4 hours ago, Paul Woodward said:

I think the GS is a great board...they also haven’t really replaced it with anything.

3 hours ago, CHarrell said:

 I think people really wanted an SV2.

 

I think the GS got squeezed out from both sides, from above and below. Originally, it was priced a good amount above an SV1, and well below a Kronos. But then the SV2 came out at a higher price than the SV1, and the Nautilus came out at a lower price than the Kronos, and so suddenly there were arguably three quality piano boards in a relatively tight price range. So the middle child had no space of its own. Then also, the SV2 added some of the GS features missing from the SV1 (split/layer, more/larger piano sample sets), the Nautilus took away some of the Kronos aspects a GS buyer may not have wanted (a control surface that seemed like an airplane cockpit), so GS ended up being less differentiated from the models above and below not just in price, but in features/presentation as well.

[jejefunkyman]

The Italian piano is also available on the SV2, in several versions (like standard and bright). I personally like it very much, even more than the CP88 acoustic pianos which I tested in a shop.

Roland acoustic pianos are a no go for me: they sound way too bright and artificial to my ears.

But as far as acoustic piano tones are concerned, this is a way too subjective topic to get to a consensus on which brand provides the best acoustic piano tones 😉

Plus there's always the never ending discussion on what is better between modeled and sample tones.

 

 

[drawback]

I really liked my GrandStage, in every aspect except that there was no deep editing. From VIs, I'd grown accustomed to editing APs & EPs and haven't really been satisfied with any hardware board presets. When I got my Kronos2 I felt (and still feel) it bests an SV1/2, and just about any other keyboard I've played. 

[David Emm]

Amusing thread for me, because I was selling synths for a mom-&-pop store when the RD-1000 appeared. I sold one to a man who did a local version of jingle writing/documentary soundtracking/retirement home bits/small holiday shows. We sat with it for a few hours and kept staring at each other like the "2001" monolith had just materialized, which it kinda had. The DP field has grown enormously since then, but that was my launch pad moment with the technology. The best part of it is that I essentially have Roland's "Structured Adaptive Synthesis" in Pianoteq, where its well refined. Science fiction, in the comfort of my own home.

[Radagast]

37 minutes ago, David Emm said:

The best part of it is that I essentially have Roland's "Structured Adaptive Synthesis" in Pianoteq, where it’s well refined. Science fiction, in the comfort of my own home.

I don’t believe Roland’s SAS used physical modeling.  When Roland came out with physical modeling, I don’t remember them making any connection to SAS.  The following article explains:

 

”Initially, precise details about the workings of SAS have been difficult to get hold of outside Japan. Perhaps understandably, Roland's R&D people are being guarded about releasing the fine details of what the process does and how it does it.

What we do know is that, in developing SAS, Roland engineers have painstakingly sampled all 88 notes of several different makes of grand piano (Steinway included), and analysed the resulting waveforms on a mainframe computer. More important, the study then went on to analyse the changes in harmonic structure that occur not only as pianists play up and down the keyboard, but as they play one note with different velocities. In total, the harmonic structure variations at 128 different velocities - all the way from pianissimo to fortissimo - were analysed for each key. Which goes some way to explaining why it's taken Roland so long to come up with SAS...”

 

http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/structured-sound/1825
 

It doesn’t sound like there was any modeling of the physical attributes of a piano, but rather just the harmonic changes.  That sounds more like a version of additive synthesis like the Kurzweil 150.