My FW-EXB is a COMPLETE LEMON!

foxymoron · Post by **foxymoron** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 12:32 am

I bought the Firewire card for my M3M as soon as it came out. BIG MISTAKE. It's a POS from the word go. The latency is unbelievable. I read all the threads on it and tried as hard as I could to remedy the situation, it's still latency city. I have a Mac Pro with 4 gigs of ram. There should be extremely LOW latency if any and I shouldn't be able to hear it no matter what I play. I have the M3M. I have the M3M going into one of the two firewire ports on the Mac Pro. I have a MOTU Traveler in the other. If I run midi cables along with the USB cable, the latency is reduced considerably, but it is by no means acceptable. It's GOD AWFUL. I am absolutely pissed that I wasted $225 on a useless piece of garbage. I have tried lowering my buffers in Logic to 128. No change! I tried using the plug-in delay to reduce latency. No change! This is two times that I have been ripped off by Korg! First, I was conned with the duplicitous, dishonest advertising of their Korg Komponent Keyboard system into buying the M3M, thinking that I could get the keybed later. Then I find out that for some inexplicable reason, they do not plan to sell the keybed as a component. Why call it a component system then? Even Steven Kay agreed that it was a logical assumption for me to make when I bought the M3M that the keybed would of course be available, but NO! And now, as I read the previous thread on this crappy firewire card, I can see that those of us who are suffering the pain of having been ripped off and mistreated by a yet another self-serving company will get no response and no help with this lemon. Assuming that there will be no response to this post, (why should I expect more?) it is also a given that I will never buy another Korg product.

fm

Coronado · Post by **Coronado** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 2:30 am

I can feel your pain. I'm not as upset as you. May be because it's my first and.. I love to solve these things For me it's like a puzzle.
On the other side I have also mixed feelings about the M3 and the FW board in particular. As you read the FW-threads I asume you read my comments, so I won't repeat them. Inspite of all the features, bells and whistles a hardware synth/ workstation should be rock solid. Well.. the M3 is not! On the other hand.. what's a hardware synth nowadays....

I wish I could give you some advise, but I know next to nothing about Apples other then to eat them. Sorry about that. I trust Korg is working on this issue and will work it out eventually.

I hope you cool down a little and find yourself in an interesting love/hate relationship with your M3. These relationships are often the best, because seldom boring...

bkboy · Post by **bkboy** » Mon Jul 21, 2008 6:35 pm

actually, I also want to know regarding this because no Korg official has commented on the complaints of the EXB-FW. (i know they are working fervently on another workstation/synth that doesn't look like this one and will probably have something borrowed from the pa2prox...well maybe not, because i don't think they want to jeopardize the sales of pa series.

for me, m3's biggest flaw (standalone) is the knobs and sliders force the parameters to jump from initial state to the slider value, very ridiculous! this makes it totally unfit for live tweaking.

can you change this in any way? is it really a flaw or is it something that has to be set?

Coronado · Post by **Coronado** » Tue Jul 22, 2008 1:27 am

@ bkboy.
I can't help you with the slider issue. May be somebody else can. If you are using a PC I can recommend you to use Asio4all as your asio driver. I use this and it makes a lot of difference. Before it was nearly impossible to play the M3, due to the latency. Now it is acceptable. http://www.asio4all.com.

Synthoid · Post by **Synthoid** » Tue Jul 22, 2008 12:26 pm

bkboy wrote:i know they are working fervently on another workstation/synth that doesn't look like this one

That's pretty amusing. So we should expect a replacement for the M3 at NAMM this winter?

thrinithan · Post by **thrinithan** » Tue Jul 22, 2008 4:50 pm

Synthoid wrote:
bkboy wrote:i know they are working fervently on another workstation/synth that doesn't look like this one
That's pretty amusing. So we should expect a replacement for the M3 at NAMM this winter?

I want a crossgrade option from Korg

Riley333 · Post by **Riley333** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 11:38 am

After working with Korg to trouble shoot the exb fw we arrived at the decision that it was a bad card, I decided to test it on another PC before sending it back so I bought a FW card and put it in my desktop (my desktop had USB only) Then I tried the VST plugin out with live on it and it worked perfectly.

The big differnce between the my laptop and desktop is.

Laptop, Intel dualcore, 1.6G per core. It has 5 devices assigned to IRQ 19.

Desktop, AMD dualcore, 3G per core, It has 1 device on IRQ 19, the exb fw.

I think windows XP on some intel chips is going to crowd IRQ 19 that exb fw uses and AMD seems to allocate the resourecs in a better way for the exb fw.

This is just my guess, i'm not stating this as fact.

Riley

thrinithan · Post by **thrinithan** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 11:23 pm

Riley333 wrote:After working with Korg to trouble shoot the exb fw we arrived at the decision that it was a bad card, I decided to test it on another PC before sending it back so I bought a FW card and put it in my desktop (my desktop had USB only) Then I tried the VST plugin out with live on it and it worked perfectly.

The big differnce between the my laptop and desktop is.

Laptop, Intel dualcore, 1.6G per core. It has 5 devices assigned to IRQ 19.

Desktop, AMD dualcore, 3G per core, It has 1 device on IRQ 19, the exb fw.

I think windows XP on some intel chips is going to crowd IRQ 19 that exb fw uses and AMD seems to allocate the resourecs in a better way for the exb fw.

This is just my guess, i'm not stating this as fact.

Riley

It's a common fact that audio interfaces should have their own IRQ to work at it's best. So no real surprise it worked better on your Desktop.