Nord User Forum

Mrniceguy76 wrote:

cambe wrote: This gatekeeping that "Clavia should be different and prevent any communication with their users and that is right because they are different", in no way improves the user experience of their products...

Smaller and bigger companies do that

I completely agree with you, very well said!

Also, I don't agree with the opinions about Nord taking so much time to update libraries are okay. Why would it be? Clav samples are 12 years old, EP-s also old (still sounds great thats for sure but there is always something to improve) and the pianos before Royal Grand just sound useless to me.

I would have no problem with all these "issues" but we are talking about 4000-5000$ hardware and in this price category I cannot accept it. Thats why I canceled my NS3C order and leaning toward a cheaper/better sound quality option: Spectrasonics Keyscape + Omni + midi controller + sound card since I already own an M1 Macbook

analogika wrote:Considering their size (<40 employees IIRC) and the sickness ratio caused by Covid in any company in recent times, it’s a wonder the company is still functioning at all, frankly.

Miguel2202 wrote:On paper Clavia as a company are doing better than ever in 2021, they had a small dipp in 2020, but are back in 2021 stronger than ever, they are a "aktiebolag" as we say in sweden so there are alot of info online regarding there revenue.
They are probably just working on the new stuf

https://www.bolagsfakta.se/5590607114-Nord_Keyboards_AB

StrangeAeons wrote:This time I have to agree with Analogika. I have owned several keyboards of many a different make, but half of them were Korg. Well, I'll let you in on a secret: Korg never updates anything substantial, they simply don't care aside from their Kronos/Nautilus flaghships (but would anybody here seriosly contend the Kronos' library is bigger than Nord's?) and the occasional bugfix a few months or a couple year after the product was released at most. One of the reasons why I switched to Nord was that my currently-sold Korg boards' (especially the KingKorg, the potential of which Korg never bothered truly valorise) syncing and editing software was never updated to x64 Mac binaries, thus breaking compatibility with all Mac OS iterations from Catalina onwards. And that's absolutely unacceptable, not only because we're talking about products they still sell but also because it's frankly ridiculous to break compatibility for the most common OS amongst musicians (especially back when Apple still only used Intel CPUs: even just a Wine package would have been an acceptable stopgap measure).

Likewise, Yamaha rarely releases significant updates for their keyboards (even the Montage's last update dates back to 2020). The only big manufacturer I can praise is Roland, but that's only because they've started adopting a common platform for their digital keyboards (Zen). Want to talk about smaller companies? Viscount hasn't updated their Legend organs since 2018 and the updated was never made available for Macintosh either. Crumar does update their lineup frequently but, concerning their Mojo organs, no real improvements were made since 2017-2018: and certainly the Mojo 61 can't even compare to the Electro for anything that's not pure Hammond tones.

Finally, it's hard to complain about the Wave 2 if it doesn't have any bugs: well actually, the arpeggiator not sending MIDI messages definitely sounds like a bug, but has anybody tried writing Nord? They often reply and might genuinely be unaware of this strange issue. Some of you might have heard of Korg releasing outstanding updates to their hybrid analogue-digital synths, like adding oscillators and such: that just means they shipped an incomplete product to save money and sell as "updates" what's simply the full capabalities of their machines. This doesn't hold true for the Lead series but I can't recall a single manufacturer that strives to let you enjoy the latest samples a decade after: there's people still gigging with a Wave 1 or old Electro and Stage models, but no pro, and very few dedicated amateurs still play keyboards from more than a decade ago (and when they do you can clearly feel they sound "old": the Kronos might be the only notable exception).

Sorry for the screech, but my point is: the grass always looks greener on the other side, keyword here "looks". Nord's been less active than it used to be but they're not alone: I believe we should wait another year before we can start taking stock of their committment and financial status. They can still get back on track after despite taking so long to release the 4.0 Library: and even if Nord just went and wound up (highly unlikely) our keyboards would still hold their value much better than most competing products.