Will Korg Radias be replaced soon?

[TiUser]

I technically agree - but what we face is that most PC's run Windows and most music apps for PC are Windows centered too.

Kronos is a great example how you can get great performance from something I guess is "second class" PC HW inside when we compare to current high end PC's. The point is custom tailoring all, HW and SW (including using an appropriate OS).

I think there is a big difference in how you use a PC. While for recording latency isn't a big deal when the DAW does proper latency compensation and you have direct monitoring. For live performance things get more difficult. You can't simply increase latency to run more plugins as realtime performance needs instant response.

Glitches and no seamless sound transition is a design flaw in most VST. Some rare VST's show that it's not impossible but most do just stop the sound and more often than not there is also any fancy transition noise.

Dropouts are due to the lack of processing power control. This does basically not change much even when you reserve one processor core to audio. What it needs is dynamic voice (per note) allocation and carefully monitoring real time load. Just to add, Windows load meters show average loads and usually audio drop outs occur much earlier than values here suggest, especially with small audio buffer sizes.

What Kronos (and some rare other HW like Kurzweil) does to accomplish seamless sound transition is based on fundamental design to dynamically assign resources to voices/notes and control processing needs to end up with voice stealing rather than overloads and glitching.

I guess when Kronos comes with great sounds it could be a big success and a demanded keyboard for life performers. Also everything can be already get in one or the other way there is no other HW keyboard offering all this in one single package (except OASYS probably). ATM there is none that can deal with samples in GB range. Is there any PC sampler without loading times? Direct streaming isn't really new either but which PC sampler does it?

Anyway, it's interesting to see the evolution of HW and PC software. Just I think there is too much progress focused on fancy features rather than making live easier when using this stuff - like seamless sound transition does for performers - no need for pre-loading and meticulously planning song chains and transitions any more.

[Radek]

Kronos is a great example how you can get great performance from something I guess is "second class" PC HW inside when we compare to current high end PC's. The point is custom tailoring all, HW and SW (including using an appropriate OS).

Well... Dual core Atom ((2 core * 2 issue pipeline * 1.6Hhz)/ 48KHz / 100) will have over 1000 instructions per sample at 100 voices of polyphony. Of course something more contemporary like Core would be even better. Perhaps for Korg's purposes Atom was perfectly sufficient. I'd love to see actual processing budgets for other HW synthesisers and effects. Such informations could be eye opening...

Glitches and no seamless sound transition is a design flaw in most VST. Some rare VST's show that it's not impossible but most do just stop the sound and more often than not there is also any fancy transition noise.

Yes! It's shame that with so powerful processors we still have to deal with such omissions... Universal voice management is very needed thing indeed.

[TiUser]

...Perhaps for Korg's purposes Atom was perfectly sufficient...

Yes. People do seldom weight in details... Kronos power supply needs are less than half what an OASYS consumes while providing nearly the same numbers of polyphony. Less power consumption means also less heat. Maybe Kronos runs without fans?!... PC's are quite power hungry in comparison.