I am a musician for over 30 years, and 70 percent of my gear was always and still is KORG, now the complaint that I have is, I have a Korg Pa800 and I need the CPU board, and the part is discontinued, what are we supposed to do? throw it in the garbage? companies like Korg should at least have parts for at least 10 years? now if I were to call Roland and ask a part for a 1984 FP8 for example would probably still have the part. Do they think we are that stupid to keep supporting these companies? In order to get support you can only email KORG? why can't I talk to a real person? too much to pay one?
Maybe I should re-evaluate? I am very unsatisfied and probably there are many fellow musician that are probably in the same situation?

Can they give you the part make model number ? Maybe you can source it from elsewhere ?

Get a Kronos... its open market CPu boards.. i recently bought 2 spare boards including CPU and memmory for €30 each.. i save them for later..


the problem with old hardware parts is that Korg also buys them, and when they are no longer available and Korg runs out of stock its over and out.. Roland produces its own hardware boards, or so i believe..


Another thing is that not all dealers are allways honest, you should make sure to inquire at Korg itselves for your parts.. Did you mail Korg US?

Also make sure to have friends in other (preferably european) countries inform about the part with their Korg representatives.. it could even be possible that the stuff is out of stock in your country and the Korg representatives in your Country dont deem it worthy to get new stock..

May be a long shot but might be worth setting up an Ebay search for PA800 "for parts" or "not working"....Shame on KORG for that.... they should stock parts to service their keyboards!

Maybe its better to ask this at the orriginal Korg forums... There are some Korg representatives reading everything overthere and they might have better answers then we...

Vangelis:
I know it says 'guitar-parts' in the name, buy try here:


http://www.guitar-parts.com/catalog/korg

Vangelis,
I totally agree. I have a Korg Microarranger, which I love, that stopped working. I took it to a repair center - 4 MONTHS LATER they informed me the motherboard was bad. I got a quote of $600.00 just for the motherboard. A brand new KMA costs $499.00 full retail. So I called Korg and they gave me the number for a company called " Parts Is Us" and I called them. They gave me a quote of over $500.00 for the motherboard.

Guess I'll throw it in the trash.

Deane

I found the motherboard in GREECE, because I had a friend keyboard player and it cost a lot more then what it was here, but that's not why I wrote this post, the reason that I write this article is for my fellow musician to wake up and start realizing that these companies keep reinventing the wheel and we are buying this junk.
I still have a GEM WK8 which is probably over 20 years old and nothing has happened to that, no switches, no motherboards, nothing has gone wrong other then the tempo encoder which I did not find anywhere, and this keyboard has been in so many smokey and very humid environments. Why did KORG make the I30 and the Pa80 very sturdy? and make the Triton Extreme flimsy? now the only reason that I stayed with KORG is the patches that circulated over the years which I cannot replicate on other brands, or else I would of abandoned them many years ago.

Bachus, what country in Europe do you live? these parts for the KRONOS are really cheap, I don't think they cost that much here in the US? by the way a few years ago ,I needed a power supply for a Triton rack and in the US it was over 100 bucks and in Greece I got it for 25 Euro,go figure when the instruments are a lot more in Europe.

Hi There

My Pa800 has just gone kaput and according to Korg UK seems it could be one of three circuit boards causing the problem,they have all three in stock. It may be worth contacting Korg UK.

Col

I think parts is us is the official parts dealer of Korg in the US.. it gets mentioned quite a few times over on the Korg Forums.

Thats really evil by the way, not showing any customer support at all. But then, not every comapny has an AJ taking care of this stuff.


One more Question to Vangelis, how did people on the Korg forums react to this?

I didn't post, but I will soon.

I remember there was a similar problem with the Korg M3 touchscreen. There were many defectious touchscreens, they were not responsive in some areas of the screen. For a certain time Korg couldn't provide the fitting spare part any more.

That was because they ran out of stock, and they had to wayt till Korg themselves could buy new ones with the touchscreen company..

Soemtimes people forget how companies that dont create all companies are very dependent on the manufactorers.. Thats also the reason they had to take the Oasys out of production and many other products, because the manufactorers of the parts just stopped producing and selling them..

Same probably goes for the pa 800 series mainboard.. If Korg runs out of stock, they cant help you, because they are not manufactored anymore by a 3rd party. I think electronics where never meant to have an eternall live, and with the current state of technollogy where often parts cant be repaired anymore, you must hope that there is still replacement parts when yours breaks down..

Legally you cant blame Korg for not having the part available anymore, and it might just as well have been any other company out there suffering this fate..