Korg KRONOS 2 Discontinued?
It appears that after 11 years, Korg have decided to discontinue the KRONOS line of music workstations, leaving the Nautilus as their new “top of the heap.”
Prior to yesterday, the KRONOS occupied several spaces in the “Music Workstations” section of the Korg website. If you do a little digging, you will find that KRONOS has now taken its place in Korgs “Product Archive” section.
I’m neither surprised nor upset by this turn of events. It was inevitable that Korg would move on eventually. Eleven years is a long time in the flagship workstation category, after all. The parts it’s based on are getting scarce — its Intel motherboard was discontinued not long after the KRONOS was introduced. And, almost all of the other major manufactures have had newer products out for a couple of years now, the Roland Fantom being probably the most advanced new workstation-class synthesizer on the market today, especially now that it’s been through a few operating system upgrades. There are many other amazing new general/performance synths on the market now — a workstation is simply one that has a complete or nearly complete facility for composing and producing complete songs. And that’s a special class in which nothing has really been able to compete with the KRONOS until very recently. Some would argue that KRONOS still has no equal, though I believe that at least Roland is getting really close.
It’s quite possible that the time of the music workstation is at an end, as people have been turning more and more to computers — in the studio, in the home, and on stage — as their “weapon of choice” when it comes to music creation. Alternatively, the power of an iPad has become formidable, and they’ve become a quite capable music production platform. Still others have turned “old school” with multitrack recorders and a plethora of standalone synthesizers and hardware sequencers.
My personal approach will be to stick with the KRONOS on stage. For one thing, mine is only just over a year old, and I’ve really come to enjoy its capabilities as a performance keyboard. I have absolutely no plans to retire the KRONOS simply because it’s been discontinued — it should be a viable instrument for years to come. I do intend to get a bigger controller, probably the Nektar Panorama T6, to use in place of the Arturia Minilab to give me more capability on stage. I am considering acquiring some spare parts, in case I do need a repair and parts can’t be found. Honestly, if I had the money, I’d buy another whole KRONOS right now — it’s still that good and the Nautilus is really not a replacement as it lacks the realtime controllers and aftertouch that I’ve come to depend on.
So, yeah, the KRONOS is discontinued, and I’m not really all that concerned. I’m just happy I was able to get one when I did.
While the computer is fine as a DAW, I will never consider it a capable replacement for a synthesizer in a performance environment — I’ve seen things go sideways with computers on stage far too many times. I would love to see a Kronos-alike that was simply a synth without all the DAW trappings embedded, as I don’t use a DAW to its full capacity at any rate.
Do one thing, and do it well. And do it right. As far as the Nautilus goes, the lack of sliders on it makes it a total loss if I ever needed to replace my Kronos with something that isn’t a Kronos. “Close to the Edge” and a couple other songs absolutely demand the ability for real-time fade-ins and volume adjustments on a per-layer basis.
Roland will never get my money (again), for multiple reasons, one of them being that their equipment of late feels like toys. Korgs are tanks, and they are well worth the lug factor in transporting from one place to another.
I feel the same way, Jace. I tried computers on stage, and it just wasn’t been my cup of tea. Of course, we both feel this way about the computers, but the reality is that our Kronoses (Kroni?) and the Nautilus really are little PCs — the CPU board is pretty much a standard Intel MiniATX motherboard with an Atom processor running a custom Linux build, so I do get a little nervous some nights. So, it’s a bit of a conundrum, really. Most modern keyboards are some sort of computer at their core, so I’m beginning to think we may be headed towards being forced down the PC (or some sort of computer) in our rigs.
And, I know keyboardists who swear by Mainstage or a similar program and a laptop, and they tour with them with great outcomes. With the prices of good stage keyboards being what they are, it’s less expensive to get good controllers and carry a couple of computers in case one fails. I can get a couple of nice controllers and a couple of laptops and a couple of small interfaces for less than the price of one Kronos or Fantom. So, maybe it is a way to go. I just don’t know anymore.
I’m also sure that Korg is going to have to come out with something to counter Roland, especially after Roland came out with the Fantom 0-series to compete with the Nautilus. Of course, Korg has been rapidly bringing out software versions of smaller synths like the Wavestate and the OpSix. Some people are hoping for a software version of the Kronos, which would certainly be possible. Besides porting the product to Windows or MacOS, the biggest hurdle would be replacing the custom hardware interfaces, and that would mostly involve the touchscreen. The existing keyboard interface is a custom serial device, but existing controllers work just fine over USB or MIDI.
Interesting times…