Chas,

Verrrrrry interesting.....that no one took the opportunity to explore what you said here!

Lucky

Because it's been done to death!!

Yes...you're absolutely right! I'm real tired of reading the numerous postings here about "improving our playing skills." It's going into overkill. Every other post here (no...I meant 1 out of 2) reeks with patter about how we should concentrate on playing first and instrument technology second. Don't folks get tired of talking about actually making music as compared to keyboard talk? C'mon now, stop with this flood of dribble about how you make your music when I really want to hear more about keyboards!

Lucky backs up at this point to remove his tongue from his cheek and proceeds to read the Oasys reports!

Lucky

LOL!

Guess it all depends on where your interest is, DESIGNING keyboards.....or PLAYING them.

chas

And in closing, how does the technology that was introduced with the Oasys translate into an Arranger Keyboard? I own the Pa2xpro. I owned then returned the Korg M3. Both of those have chipsets with Oasys lineage.

However, there are not many features of the Oasys that have propagated to the Pa2 other than maybe the fidelity of the chip and some of the soundset.

If you look at Yamaha for a second, they tend to create their sound chips for the Arranger first, then roll that technology into the workstation; IMHO. The Tyros 2 introduced Super Articulation and a sound chip that was not yet available in the Motif series. Does this mean the the Arranger product lines outsell workstations?

I would love to hear Korg's take on R&D philosophy when it comes to arrangers vs. workstations and how the two teams either play nice or not at all.

------------------
Al Giordano
http://www.arrangerworld.com


Korg Pa2xpro, Roland VK8-M, DW Collectors Series Drums, Roland TD-12 Vdrums, Roland SPD-S.

Al, I had been seriously considering getting a Korg M3 (the thinking being that I'd get a 'poor man's' Oasys). Can you descripe briefly your ownership experience and say why you decided not to keep it.

Thanks,

chas

The Pa2xPro and the M3 share a chipset, but the OASYS hardware is completely different. It doesn't use a Korg chipset for audio at all; instead, it is entirely based on software running on the P4 CPU. One of the OASYS synthesis engines, the HD-1, was designed to be similar to the M3's chipset (which was in development at the same time as the OASYS), and in many ways sounds similar.

However, the HD-1 also offers various advantages over its chipset-based siblings, including faster & smoother envelopes, LFOs, etc., lossless compression of sample data, improved sample transposition, wave sequencing, per-voice vector, etc.

The software-based nature of the OASYS allows completely different synthesis engines to be implemented, as well. In the OASYS, these are called Expansion Instruments (EXi). These EXi include a tonewheel organ model, a plucked string physical model, a waveshaping/FM/PCM-processing modular synth, and three VA synths with different oscillators and filters. One of these VA synths is called the AL-1.

The RADIAS synth board, available as an option for the M3, includes as one of its synth types a VA oscillator based on the AL-1, although without the AL-1's low-aliasing oscillator sync. Some of the filters are also similar.



Our teams work together as much as possible.

Best regards,

Dan

Hey Chas,

In many ways I loved the M3. The case, style, and ergonomics were smart and beautiful. I had been a Triton/Triton extreme owner previously so I knew the keyboard history very well.

I was hoping the M3 would bring with it a sensational Piano. I didn't find that to be the case. In order to get a decent Piano sound out of the M3, I had to bit-fiddle with the multi-samples and filtering. Some of the sounds were phenomenal, but the variety and selection quantity was quite low, especially compared to the well appointed TE76. I had felt the value was an issue at the time. Korg have since released many new banks of sounds for the M3 that were not available when I had it.

The other reason I was looking to the M3 was for the Karma features. The website demos at Karma-Lab blew me away. I had lot's of fun playing with those. However, I really didn't see myself as a Karma author, just a user.

So in the end I decided to go for the Pa2xpro which has almost the same look and feel as the M3, same chipset, but with arranger functions rather than Karma. The two boards really compliment each other very well.

That's my short version.
Al

[This message has been edited by kbrkr (edited 07-02-2008).]

Just curious, but did the Oasys's speed of sample loading make it down to the M3?

How many MB/sec can you load up in one of those?

BTW, this is one of those specs which ought to be on ALL sampler spec pages. It is one of the most fundamental things for a live sampler user (that, and whether it goes dead while you load).