Nord User Forum

I was reading something on the interwebz which made me instantly think "Nord". It was about amazingly successful businesses and how apple are utterly amazing and profitable. Here's a take on their business plan.

1. Come up with an utterly amazing design which blows everything else out of the water.

2. Remove as many features as you possibly can whilst having an item which is still saleable.

3. Add a new feature each year until you attain the original product.

4. Cheeeeer Chiiiing!!!!!!!!!

All greatness can be found in its simplicity.

For sure this plan is pretty close.

I'd add to this simple Clavia-spesific interpretation to rules #2 and #3.

2.1 Remove as much memory as you possibly can whilst having an item which is still saleable.

3.1 Add little more memory each year until you attain the original product.


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.

When I pay £3k for a board, I expect to be able to upgrade it like a PC. This memory lark isn't good enough.

I reckon the Stage2 EX won't be the deal either. I will upgrade when the Stage3 comes out, which I imagine will be upgrade-able.

Uhm, why would you need more memory?? So you could upload all the xl and l pianos for which eventually you only pick one out of all for 99% of your performances?

Look it from the other side. With a small amount of memory the Nord users are challenged to make a thoughtfull decision which sound to choose. Isn't that a whole other approach? You picked the best of the best sounds.
The bigger isn't always better.

I understand the frustrating part of the limitations in memory. But we only complain about it because we get the freedom to determine what to do with it. If we didn't had a choice and we had to play with fixed programs and sounds nobody would complain. Right??

...Still nobody has given me answer to my question: Why there's so little amount of memory in times when memory is cheap in general and you can put gigabytes in very small space? Is there some real reason - other than this market plan to not make too good instruments! - behind it, why they cannot put for example 2 GB instead of 500MB for pianos?

And it's not only Clavia, other companies use these ridiculously small capasities as well. Worst things of all are drum machines like Roland V-drums: they could quite easily make expressive drum sounds with just adding memory. Those machines really suck because of lack of memory.

And I don't agree with NordFan that there's no use for all those three XL pianos inside same instruments. I'd really like to have all those three and all those best e-pianos in my NP or NS2. And as we have seen, there's a pressure to have epiano updates as well: many many people have asked for bigger and more detailed epianos. Let's see, maybe Clavia has this plan: releasing XL-epiano library with new NS2ex. And here we are, once again selling our stuff and earning more money for new ones. This business is more and more resembling mobile phone business: biggest challenge for them is to make us to replace our phones/keyboards very often.

on which other instrument will you have more user-memory without the loading time?

On all other instruments with sample user-memory I've had, there's always a long time to load the samples, the bigger the slower.

Ramon

JacksonP wrote:...Still nobody has given me answer to my question: Why there's so little amount of memory in times when memory is cheap in general and you can put gigabytes in very small space? Is there some real reason - other than this market plan to not make too good instruments! - behind it, why they cannot put for example 2 GB instead of 500MB for pianos?

....

Hello All,

IMHO:
While today's memory IS cheap, the hardware architecture changes, and operating system rewrite required to utilize the new memory, is extremely expensive. To utilize today's cheap memory, the NS2 would have to be a radically different instrument. Does anyone honestly think that Nord could have put a gig or more of memory in the NS2 and just chose not to?

All instrument manufacturers "not just Nord" build upon the research and development of previous models, that R & D has been fully amortized and results in additional profits to the company. If a company isn't profitable, it goes out of business.

Take for example the Korg OASYS. Elements of that project have found their way into at least 5 different products, the latest being the Kronos.

I consider Korg and Nord to be at opposite ends of the business spectrum.
Korg has hundreds of products, whereas Nord has about 10.
Yet Nord is still amazingly competitive.

It's hard to fund and support big R & D projects on just the income of 10 products.
Certainly in today's economy, a smaller company is not likely to risk large amounts of capital on radical new products that won't begin returning the investment in less than 3 years.

I wouldn't expect Nord to chime in on this question, as there's nothing to be gained by it.
I don't believe that they are purposefully withholding memory just to release a NS2Ex or NS3 in the coming years.
So far I'm quite satisfied with the 256M in my NSEx. If they release an XL version of my favorite Steinway Grand Lady D, then there's going to be problems.

Cheers, Hanon

JacksonP wrote:...Still nobody has given me answer to my question: Why there's so little amount of memory in times when memory is cheap in general and you can put gigabytes in very small space? Is there some real reason - other than this market plan to not make too good instruments! - behind it, why they cannot put for example 2 GB instead of 500MB for pianos?

And I don't agree with NordFan that there's no use for all those three XL pianos inside same instruments. I'd really like to have all those three and all those best e-pianos in my NP or NS2. And as we have seen, there's a pressure to have epiano updates as well: many many people have asked for bigger and more detailed epianos. Let's see, maybe Clavia has this plan: releasing XL-epiano library with new NS2ex. And here we are, once again selling our stuff and earning more money for new ones. This business is more and more resembling mobile phone business: biggest challenge for them is to make us to replace our phones/keyboards very often.

Well, first of all. Just try and get a class 10 micro SD card. Now see the price. Now think that the NS memory should be above a class 10 SD card, faster than USB 2.0 (so no usb sticks). They could do a USB 3.0 memory card, but then you´d have to load in the samples everytime you turn it on (which is a turn off IMO). SO in order for them to save some 300 USD bucks, you "only" get 500 mb, but I think that the compression rate for their format is 3 times smaller than the original, so it is like you got 1.5 GB of samples or something like that. Note that the piano´s on the page ARE compressed... well yo figure all what that means. PLUS sure, they can put newer memory things, but like someone else said, that changes the architecture of the chipboards, and that means, new parts altogether, that means NS2 EX. That is the reason the EX version was made, clavia was forced to get newer memory chips and had to redo the whole boards, meaning a very different hardware version, but still designed to have the same OS.

So that is why, well at least that is what I think is why,

Saludos,
Gustavo

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.