Korg OASYS - two years later - Sound quality
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 12 Nov 2006

What about the sound?

The first and the most important thing to me was, of course, the sound/patches quality, especially those things that were mentioned in the press-announcement - drums, ensemble, piano, and stuff. Although the first test I did was with 133MB piano, it sounded really good - definately better then the stock Triton Studio's Concert Grand Piano (Bosendorfer). Now that I have a rather vast experience with EXs2 piano, I can only say that this is by far the best piano I've ever heard to come out of (not only) Korg's keyboard. My primary instinct that I got from the sound back in January 2005. was - this is not a Bosendorfer. I believe that it's Steinway B or D, couldn't really tell exactly from the PA, but I was pretty sure that the Steinway was sampled...
Drums sound really HQish, very powerfull and real. Finally some really usable sounds for all of us - rock, metal, dance, trance, techno freaks - really "knocking-on-your-head" sounds that you will surely notice when you try it out. Ensemble sounds are also way better leaving the Triton generation behind in a huge amound of smoke. Violins and string orchestra sounds are excellent, flute sound could be a bit better, as well as the sax-clarinet stuff, but I believe it's the matter of a small tweaking-process (and, perhaps, buying a wind controller). I remember the Triton Studio Grand Piano tweaking (three straight days with no food, but it sounds great to me ever since), so I believe there's pretty much room for your own improvement.
Like I said before, the things that I missed in the whole Triton generation were those pads and electric pianos the Trinity had - very warm, lush, everything from pretty hard to very soft, but just - pads. OASYS has a pretty large amount of pads that sound really good. Some of the demoes Stephen Kay did on his presentations reminded me very much on the Trinity-days-demoes he made. And now that I'm doing some programming on my own, I'd say that I have finally found a keyboard that had "that" pad sound that I like. Excellent work there, Korg!