Korg Forums

EvilDragon wrote:It voids your warranty. Dan has said that Kronos has "no user-serviceable parts inside". Which means, if you open it yourself, you've just voided your warranty. Simple as that.

To clarify, I wrote the following in response to a question about whether a user could swap the internal drive themselves in the event of failure etc.:

"There are no user-serviceable parts inside the KRONOS. Any service would be at an authorized repair center."

I didn't say anything about the warranty in particular.

shap wrote: Nope. Yes, Dan said that. But what matters is what the warranty says. And I just went looking, and I actually can't find a warranty statement in the docs. I do see various cautionary notes about operating the board in the wrong country. Oddly enough, I see no label on my keyboard to the effect that there are no user-serviceable parts in side, nor any label stating that opening the enclosure voids the warranty. There is a label identifying a risk of shock if the enclosure is opened.

Now this may be an oversight, and you can be sure that if you break something by opening up the enclosure it's not going to be treated as a warranty repair. But I don't see anything to the effect that opening the keyboard voids the warranty.

Since I can't find it in the manuals, can somebody point me at the actual warranty document? With all respect to Dan, and with considerable respect for his advice in all respects, Dan's statements neither define nor modify the warranty. I'd like to read the actual warranty for myself.

Warranty is provided by the national Korg distributor. From my reading of the two examples below, terms may vary depending on the distributor.

http://www.google.com/search?client=saf ... 8&oe=UTF-8

For example,

Korg USA:
http://www.korg.com/Warranty.aspx

Korg UK:
http://www.korguksupport.co.uk/page.cfm?pageid=563

Some discussion of this here:
http://www.korgforums.com/forum/phpBB2/ ... d5e5b178d1

Hope this helps,

Dan

KORG UK LTD has no liability for general, consequential, incidental or special damages. These include loss of recorded data, the cost of recovery of lost data, lost profits, lost earnings and the cost of the installation or removal of any products.

The warranty does not cover:
■The warranty is only valid in the country of purchase.
■Damage from physical abuse such as dropping the unit.
■Damage due to liquid contamination and /or battery leakage
■Damage due to excessive high or low Temperature/Humidity
■Damage due to inappropriate storage.
■Physical damage to the heads of any floppy/hard disk mechanism.
■Physically damaged connectors.
■Broken keys or physical damage to the keyboard mechanism.
■Damage resulting from any use other than that it was intended for.
■Any unit that has been repaired or had an attempted repair made to it by non-Korg personnel.
■Damage due to incorrect connection, connection to faulty equipment or connection to faulty or incorrect power supplies.
■Any product whose serial number plate has been defaced or removed.
■Damage in transit as a result of inadequate packaging or protection.
■Damage to packaging including instrument/flight cases.
■Any product returned without proof of purchase.
■Product purchase as ex-demo or refurbished stock

Does adding more RAM count as a 'repair' OR an 'upgrade'?

Dan: Thank you. It is very helpful to be able to see what the warranty says. My apologies if, in summarizing another poster, I inadvertently put words in your mouth.

All: By my reading, installing additional memory does not appear to violate the U.S. warranty. However, if you manage to break something in the process, the damage you cause is not covered by the warranty. For other countries and regions, check the appropriate warranty for your region.

panrixx: Whether a RAM upgrade qualifies as a "repair or attempted repair" is a matter that I am sure lawyers could argue about until your wallet runs out of cash. In the end, I suspect the answer is "no". The plain-language intent of this wording is that Korg is not responsible if you make matters worse while trying to fix something on your own. My guess - and this is something to ask a lawyer - is that a court is likely to take a narrow reading of the warranty disclaimers, note that Korg had the opportunity to exclude warranty coverage to modified units, and chose not to do so. Your position is somewhat augmented by the fact that, under normal circumstances, installing a DIMM on the Intel motherboard is an action that a user is expected to do. Given which, it is not an action that can reasonably be deemed to require the expertise of a specially trained repair person.

As a practical matter, a company is not going to deny a warranty repair if doing so would fail the "red face test". In the age of the internet, the penalty for that sort of denial far outweighs the cost of behaving reasonably. In many cases the decision will be made by an authorized repair provider rather than by Korg. The independent repair provider gets paid by what they repair, not by what they deny. If the unit does go to Korg, Korg is not a foolish company. All that said, you could be the lucky winner whose unit ends up in the hand of a repair person who is feeling cranky that day.

In the end, of course, I'm not the one making the decision. I am pretty confident about which way the independent repair provider is going to come down on this one, though.

shap wrote:Dan: Thank you. It is very helpful to be able to see what the warranty says. My apologies if, in summarizing another poster, I inadvertently put words in your mouth.

Thank you, no apologies necessary; I just wanted to be clear!

shap wrote:Dan: Thank you. It is very helpful to be able to see what the warranty says. My apologies if, in summarizing another poster, I inadvertently put words in your mouth.

All: By my reading, installing additional memory does not appear to violate the U.S. warranty. However, if you manage to break something in the process, the damage you cause is not covered by the warranty.

thats correct, adding additional RAM could
result in:

Physically damaged connectors
■Broken keys or physical damage to the keyboard mechanism.
■Damage resulting from any use other than that it was intended for.

Another poster noted that the keyboard chassis was affected by his RAM
install effort.

GregC wrote:Another poster noted that the keyboard chassis was affected by his RAM
install effort.

The keyboard chassis wasn't really "affected" in any way, it's just that it's held in place by some of the screws that HAVE to be removed to get the bottom panel off.


It all comes down to whether you're prepared to take the risk or not... I was, and if it all goes tits-up, and Korg refuse to do anything about it, then It's my fault and I'll just have to suck it up.

Thanks for clearing this out. I apologize for jumping the gun.

LyonsT wrote:

RC-IA wrote:But we still don't know if this cancel the warranty or not..maybe not.....

I ordered the exact same ram that the one wich is in to upgrade my kronos too but i'll wait for korg green light !

Where did you get that the Hynix stuff?

French store , exists in germany too.

RC-IA wrote:But we still don't know if this cancel the warranty or not..maybe not.....

I ordered the exact same ram that the one wich is in to upgrade my kronos too but i'll wait for korg green light !

I cannot imagine Korg will ever give a green light for that. That would mean they need to fix Kroni that have been ruined by probably some people. What they can give a green light for is that the RAM is supported but you have to get it installed at an official Korg dealer/shop.

michelkeijzers wrote:

RC-IA wrote:But we still don't know if this cancel the warranty or not..maybe not.....

I ordered the exact same ram that the one wich is in to upgrade my kronos too but i'll wait for korg green light !

I cannot imagine Korg will ever give a green light for that. That would mean they need to fix Kroni that have been ruined by probably some people. What they can give a green light for is that the RAM is supported but you have to get it installed at an official Korg dealer/shop.

That's what i'm waiting for: that korg is officially supported the additionnal ram, being upgraded by an authorized korg service center. In other word, i think korg had imagined that someone would have try to put another ram in the kronos and they knew it would work, since they design the software to support it. So now we know that it is working, it would be great if korg could tell: you can upgrade your ram! This should be done by korg service center or user ( depending if you want to loose your warranty or not, this to be spoken about with your local korg since there could be different interpretation depending the country/ warranty rule)

RC-IA wrote:

michelkeijzers wrote:

RC-IA wrote:But we still don't know if this cancel the warranty or not..maybe not.....

I ordered the exact same ram that the one wich is in to upgrade my kronos too but i'll wait for korg green light !

I cannot imagine Korg will ever give a green light for that. That would mean they need to fix Kroni that have been ruined by probably some people. What they can give a green light for is that the RAM is supported but you have to get it installed at an official Korg dealer/shop.

That's what i'm waiting for: that korg is officially supported the additionnal ram, being upgraded by an authorized korg service center. In other word, i think korg had imagined that someone would have try to put another ram in the kronos and they knew it would work, since they design the software to support it. So now we know that it is working, it would be great if korg could tell: you can upgrade your ram! This should be done by korg service center or user ( depending if you want to loose your warranty or not, this to be spoken about with your local korg since there could be different interpretation depending the country/ warranty rule)

It would be beneficial for both: it can mean extra income for Korg service centers since they will probably ask (quite) some money for it. On the other hand, RAM is quite cheap so it will be less expensive than what other brands dare to ask for a RAM extension.

I think I would dare to replace it my own, on the other hand, I'm currently on my Triton Extreme barely use samples so there's not that much need for me now.

Once my M50 display stopped working and I needed to take all kind of things out of it and cleaned my n264 several times (dust inside)... most or half of the time goes into unscrewing and screwing the screws And making sure the right screws go back to the right place.

Regardless of whether or not there are user-serviceable parts inside, simply opening a unit (Korg's or anyone else's) won't void a warranty, unless opening it forces you to break a seal that says "warranty void if broken." Logically, making a completely reversible modification also won't inherently void warranty on anything, if you reverse it before bringing it in to a service center and there is no evidence of the modification ever having been done. Of course, any damage resulting from your efforts (broken RAM holders or whatever) would not be covered under warranty, and is likely to be, itself, evidence that there had been a modification done (or attempted).

But there are a couple of other considerations here. One is, it would be nice to know for sure that continuous operation of the Kronos with extra RAM would not be likely to lead to premature failure in or out of warranty (i.e. that any additional generation of heat or draw on the power supply is still well within spec for the unit). And also, if they suspect a failure *could* have been due to installation of extra RAM, it is not entirely impossible that they could determine that extra RAM had been installed, even if you removed it. There's still a linux computer in there, and there could easily be a stored log file that can hold information like how much RAM was installed at boot, and that information could be maintained historically.

RC-IA wrote:it would be great if korg could tell: you can upgrade your ram!

It would be great if Korg delivered the Kronos with 4 GB RAM from factory.

I got a set of two Corsair RAM 2GB each in BC, Canada from NCIX:
http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=38282 ... re=Corsair
With 12%HST came to $62.98
I'll install it this weekend!

Well, if opening up voids the warranty , then just about every Oasys owner did just that.
The only difference is that Korg gave the green light to add ram for the additional EXi they released..