The one clone organ that has made me pretty happy was/is my Korg CX3 - this one is part of the second wave of them made in the mid 2000s. It does a dang good Hammond, reasonable Leslie effect, and weighs a lot less than my A100! The problem is that it is ONLY an organ, so I still have to take out something else for piano and synth. I recently (< 2 months) bought an NS3 Compact. My goals were to get down to one, lightweight keyboard that "did everything well" - meaning piano, organ,and synth - and was performance oriented vs workstation oriented. NS3 seemed to fit the bill, so I splurged on it. The physical drawbars and waterfall keys tickled my Hammond fancy too.
When I first got it. I felt a little underwhelmed at the organ, which is one of the main things that I was hoping would be "killer" on it, but it just didn't sound "right" to me. I didn't have the CX3 around to compare too, and the A100 is sickly at the moment, but from what I felt and could remember in my head - the NS3 just wasn't impressing me. Anyway - i adjusted the settings and figured it was just a matter of getting things set right and getting used to it. I happily went my way for multiple gigs over the next month and a half, and the NS3 did OK - covering what i wanted in having piano/organ/synth, split keyboards, layers, etc. That part - real-time controls, etc. and frankly, most of the piano and synth sounds are great.
So today - for the first time, I had the NS3 and the CX3 both in the studio, both set-up, right on top of each other, at the same time ... and .... to my horror - but not really to my surprise given the above, my $500, 10-12 year old CX3 (if it's even worth that any more) just blows my $3500, brand new NS3 away on Hammond,
Maybe if i get some time, I'll record and post some audio samples, but the Korg is so much clearer - sharper - as far as cutting through at every frequency. The NS3 sounds - I dunno - muffled? in comparison. My first impression was that the CX3 was just a lot brighter, but honestly - it's across the board - for example - the low end of the CX3 also blows the NS3 out and makes it sound like a Casio bought from Walmart. I keep hoping maybe I've got some sort of setting wrong or something, but can't find anything. The NS3 has this low-mid presence that is really annoying, and the upper drawbars just don't "cut". Also - the leakage/cross talk in the Korg is much more pronounced than the NS3 - and yes I do have it set to Vintage 2. I am running OS 1.52 by the way.
Not sure what I "want" here except for maybe someone else to tell me I'm not (or I am) crazy? Hopefully this is something that can be addressed somewhere down the line via update, but for now, I'm quite depressed with my $3500 purchase.
KenM
