Korg M3 (p)review - part II - M3 goals
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 24 Jan 2007

But all of this is just technical stuff, because there are a couple of other goals you'd expect Korg has. At first, if you take a look at the name (M3), it's pretty clear that Korg would like for this thing to be a hot thing now and for years to come, like the M1 Workstation was. In terms of hype, market buzz, whatever you might call it. According to some reports and data I gathered in the past decade and more, M1 sold in more then 200.000 pieces, and so did Triton in its various "tastes" (Classic, Studio, Extreme, Le). What Korg's looking for here is another big-number seller. And I have a feeling they just might pull it off, if ou ask me. I mean, the substance is there: top-notch technology, excellent keybed, sounds, sequencer, wide range of possibility with various (61-key, 73-key, 88-key) models, and what I believe to be a very competitive price point.

M3 is, in a way, a small OASYS and it's designed to be that way - there's no question about it. It's not supposed to compete with it, nor it should, because it doesn't have the "juice". It has a number of technologies from the OASYS, but it's not software based (so - a chip-version of the OASYS). There's OASYS everywhere when you get down to sounds and combis, but that's absolutely not a bad thing. M3 has a proprietary hardware and software so - you can mostly forget about OASYS's way of upgrading things. There's gonna be new sounds, of course (EXB-USB-PCM), but I don't think there's gonna be new synth engines. You can use the EXB-RADIAS card and actually have a RADIAS inside, but that's it. Combining that with OASYS-like sound and KARMA... hmm, it makes you wonder, right? :-) You can also upgrade the sampling memory from standard 64MB to 320MB (64+256).