Korg Forums

Thanks for everyone’s input and contributions. Unfortunately Korg is painting us into an uncomfortable corner, it would appear.

I’m not quite to the desperation phase (yet) to try to start buying alternatives and experimenting whether they can be made to work, but I see that day out on the horizon. Hopefully a viable alternative is revealed and made available sooner rather than later.

Instead, I found a beater K2 73 on eBay which is suffering from “System startup failed”, and I’m hoping the electronics are functional so I can use it for spare parts. I was able to get it cheap enough to possibly make it worthwhile, although it is certainly more expensive than a motherboard alone.

I’ll see how bad it is cosmetically, see about getting it running, and likely salvage whatever I can - the parts should be worth more than the sum of the total, so to speak.

cjfox wrote:I am frustrated with the whole situation, as I loved my Kronos when it was working. Too many parts on the original are no longer available, and you risk going down the rabbit hole of replacing multiple parts.

You and me both. Honestly, the Kronos was amazing in 2011 and I love it today (when it works) just as much as I did then but you and I are on the same page. I barely ever use it and wouldn't even dream of using it live again. I'm 100% soft synths now and will never go back to Kronos-like hardware. I did a gig last weekend using all freeware VST's, 2 keyboard controllers, and a cheap laptop and it worked great. I wish I'd have done this sooner.

Korg, if you were to release the Kronos/Nautilus as a softsynth workstation I'm all in. I just hope that Korg spends a little more effort on it than they did the Triton VST's. They were SO close to being great and they left off key features, have tons of bugs, and lack a lot of functionality of the originals (and I'm not even referring to the lack of sampler, audio input, or sequencing capabilities).

I did a gig last weekend using all freeware VST's

WOW! I'm slowly phasing in the plugins, but it's been pretty expensive for me. I'm running Keyscape and Omnisphere along with a bunch of other plugins. I'm using an m1 Mac mini and will probably pick up the Roland RD-88 to control this system.

I've used it on a few concerts but it can't come close to replacing my Kronos due to the number of programs/combis I use. But maybe one day?

If anyone with an original Kronos is wondering about the motherboard issues, I got mine working again. I replaced a D510 with one off ebay, but as previously documented, the kronos would freeze after 1 hour. The fix is in the BIOS, a standard Intel BIOS comes with the SATA port configured to IDE, you need to change it to AHCI. from the boot screen (at the VGA port, not the kronos screen) F2->Internal chipset config-> Configure SATA as -> AHCI. Hope this helps someone else.

cjfox wrote:If anyone with an original Kronos is wondering about the motherboard issues, I got mine working again. I replaced a D510 with one off ebay, but as previously documented, the kronos would freeze after 1 hour. The fix is in the BIOS, a standard Intel BIOS comes with the SATA port configured to IDE, you need to change it to AHCI. from the boot screen (at the VGA port, not the kronos screen) F2->Internal chipset config-> Configure SATA as -> AHCI. Hope this helps someone else.

Could be useful. Thank you.

cjfox wrote:If anyone with an original Kronos is wondering about the motherboard issues, I got mine working again. I replaced a D510 with one off ebay, but as previously documented, the kronos would freeze after 1 hour. The fix is in the BIOS, a standard Intel BIOS comes with the SATA port configured to IDE, you need to change it to AHCI. from the boot screen (at the VGA port, not the kronos screen) F2->Internal chipset config-> Configure SATA as -> AHCI. Hope this helps someone else.

What motherboard did you buy? I’m looking for one for my original Kronos.

The original D510. Make sure you get one with a later BIOS, in the 500 series.