Nord business plan?

[Hanon_CTS]

Hanon: "Does anyone honestly think that Nord could have put a gig or more of memory in the NS2 and just chose not to?"

Yes me. Clavia are out for bucks not music.

Well, then reason it out.
If making more bucks is the only goal.
How much more bucks do they make by putting 500MB in there instead of a full GB.
After all, memory is cheap right?
If there weren't some type of obstacle like hardware and OS limitations, then they'd put a door on the bottom and sell more memory as an option like Korg did with my M3.
I paid $179 for 256MB extra RAM.
Now that's the way to make bucks.

Cheers, Hanon

[Johannes]

Clavia are out for bucks not music.

After all, the business of business is business, nothing wrong with that IMHO, even though you need to be passionate about your products in order to sell them.
And on the memory issue, I agree with most of what was said before. In particular, the memory and processor avancement in Mobiles etc. cannot be easily be transferred 1:1 to products such as Nord keyboards which are manufactured for a niche market which is vintage keyboard emulations with higher margins, but much lower volumes and thus inevitably a much higher operational expenses (in particular RnD). Plus, I absolutely agree about the loading time issue plus you need to have ROM AND RAM given the Nord approach of user swappable sound sets.
And finally, they are manufacturing in Sweden with a its expensive currency, only little outsourcing to Asia and a focus on built quality rather than buying the latest, cheapest and "highest spec" parts from China. Maybe they COULD even do something more on highlighting this point in terms of CSR/clean value chain etc, but as they are not listed, they are free todo what they want.

[ZeroZero]

What other equipment have I got with megabytes of ram instead of gigabytes? Well, I suppose my pocket calculator, oh and maybe the drive of my old sinclair spectrum? Now I know we are talking flash ram here, but for not a lot of cash you can get 60 gigs (or more) of this in other formats.

The USB flash drive in my pocket is 32 gig. Why can't I just plug this in to the back and utilise the space?

Whats' the consequences of insufficient memory for the nord? Well you cant load all the sounds at the same time, you have to compromise and use smaller less worthy instruments, you can't use too big a sample bank in the synth, and as for loading a sampled piano comparableto the Ivory - well .... naa!.. you better forget that.... Compromise, compromise, compromise, compromise


Why? Because, apparently, its too costly to redesign the board? Well , hmmm, how much did I pay for this?

Emmm....

Now don't get me wrong there are a lot of things to like about the stage 2, but there is a lot of compromises per buck.

Best we have got fvor what it does? Probably

Could easily be better? Most definitately

Want to use pedals - more cash.. want to read music whilst you play... more cash.... etc... etc.. and not small amounts either.

My Roberts piano cost me £600 new, came with a stand, a music stand, and triple pedals, the piano sounds were about on par with the Nord, it had string resonance too.


Value for Money? You must be joking, or you probably work for Nord marketing.

[iaorana]

The USB flash drive in my pocket is 32 gig.

Did you ever try to play music with it ZeroZero?

[Johannes]

Motif XF: ~600MB ROMpler Sounds, 128MB Ram, max. 2GB Flash Memory
MPC Sampler: max. 128MB Ram, max. 2GB FlashCard or HDD (any size)
NS2: ~900MB Ram, no Flash
Does not seem to far apart for me, and it is not supposed to host your 50GB sample library like a dedicated Akai Sampler/ Drum machine or so.

Now SSD is a different story I admit and kudos for Korg for being the first mover, but we will probably see more of that in the future in ALL brands.

[Frantz]

Using SSD has a good capacity / cost ratio, but ...

SSD is not fast enough and that means Kronos has to do a pre load of the samples into RAM.
Kronos takes more than 2 minute to startup :
It's about 40s to fully load a 900 Mb piano library (22Mb/s).
What happens if I decide to change / swap between 2 huge pianos sounds ?
On Kronos you'll have to wait a few seconds to get the full piano sound.
On NS2 it's instantly done.

More memory in the NS2 ? yesss !!!! (but please, for the moment, no SSD, no RAM, and of course no ROM)

[Hanon_CTS]

To all,
Don't misinterpret my postings as being against adding more memory in future products.
Like most of you, I would like to have more memory in my instrument.

Nord is not going to release some secret document that will allow you to increase the memory in your NS2, nor are they going to recall all of them and install more memory free of charge.

At this point with the NS2, it's a done deal.
Complaints of not enough memory in the NS2 are futile.

To address the original topic "Nord Business plan?"

I don't agree that Nord's business strategy was to purposefully withhold memory from the current product in an effort to steer buyers into a future product.

Just like all of the top instrument manufacturers, Nord went to market with an instrument built primarily on the R & D of previously successful products.

Given another year of development and refinement, the NS2 would have been different, and arguably better.

I believe that a complete redesign of the hardware and software operating system would have been too expensive and taken too long to launch a product to compete with the current flock of newly released instruments.
In a race for market share, you are either in the race, or out of the race. If you're in the race, you run when the bell sounds whether you're completely ready or not.

Cheers, Hanon

[Ecaroh]

IMO there're two things that don't match together at the moment:

First, Clavia has raised quality (and size!) of their sampled instruments (Lady, Bosie, Bright). This was the reason for me to move to Clavia. (I don't regret it, on the contrary)
Secondly, and unfortunately, their present hardware does not fully support this size of instruments. For sure when we put over 3000 euros to a digital instrument, we expect to have more than just one or two sounds in the memory.

And sorry to repeat myself, but still I'd say that there's a constant pressure to update those E-piano libraries as well to this new quality level.

P.S: Another thing has bothered me from the first moment they released NS2: They gave us sample playback in synth and more memory too, but still there's no change to use velocity layers. This makes this synth part quite handicapped. Analog modeling part is quite compromised and limited (and sorry, not very convincing to my ears). This forces me to use another module on stage... (This takes me back to another thread in Nord Piano forum in which people say that there's no market and use for modules anymore )

[Frantz]

+1 Hanon : the actual memory size of the NS2 is OK for me too.
The choice made by Nord took into account the market... all you said Hanon.
And more over, putting a SSD implies preload into RAM, that seams to be a bad solution today ... it slows things down.

I was thinking more in term of "plan" for the future NS2ex or NS3.
+1 JacksonP : I wish the memory size will follow the increase of instrument size with velocity layers (".npno" today, I hope ".nsmp" will tomorrow).
I wish the path (plan) goes toward velocity layers too. That was the first thing I looked for when opening Nord Sample Editor.

[Frantz]

No seriously, can somebody cleverer than me explain me, why they give us such a small amount memory in present times when we can buy for example mini SD cards up to 32GB with just few bucks from local market...? I know we are talking about little different type of memory here, but still it's amazing. Or is it just an example of this market plan described above? Giving customers too good keyboard (with lot of memory to make it just YOUR keyboard) would make us too happy and not to want to upgrade our rig every year.

Just a few thoughts, because I had the same reaction as you => http://www.norduserforum.com/nord-stage ... html#p2547

What speed do we need ? How much does it costs ?
If I have a look here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital
A class 10 SD card is the best we can have today, and its only capable of max 10 MB/s.
I do not want to wait 4 seconds to load/ change a (piano) sound.
On a NS2 switching from a piano to another is instantly done. Fast and persistent memory costs more than a SD card, today.
So we must compare comparables things.
I wish Nord will never compromise the speed on their gears just to increase memory size. It must stay "TOP" end (best reaction time), which has a price.

Also, there is a limit in the number of times you can read / wirte memory before it fails. I'm confident Nord did no compromise the quality for this.

Things are moving fast for memories, Korg's SSD is already outdated if we compare to the SSD that are available on the market today.

I am not involved with Nord, just bought one recently, have tried Kronos and Jupiter80, they all make choices.
This subject has some kind of "speculation"about a possible "Business Plan" which is ridiculous.
Nord is the company that frequently brings updates and new sounds.
I think women & men at Nord are passionate, they are simply doing the best, with customer respect.