Korg Oasys

An Introduction to Korg Oasys

The established musical instrument brand, Korg, released its Oasys synthesizer keyboard in 2005. It was commercially available in stores until 2009. It is the predecessor of the Korg Kronos design, and you can get it on eBay to use it to create and record digital music.

The Korg Oasys offers a 16-track digital audio workstation with a built-in CD-RW drive so that you can burn your musical creations to a CD. Since it is an RW, or rewritable drive, you can add to your CD like you would if you were saving your data to an old-school floppy disk or to a USB drive. This model of synthesizer keyboard offers the following specifications:

• 172-note polyphony in three modes - HD-1, CX-3, and PolysixEX
• 96-note polyphony - in AL-1 mode
• 52-note polyphony - in MOD-7 mode
• 48-note polyphony - in modes STR-1 and MS-20EX

Its polyphony may be reduced depending on the effects and voices used. It offers a timbre of 16 and multiple oscillators that depend on the synthesis engine setting. It provides synthesis type PCM, wave sequencing, and vector and physical modeling. There’s a built-in sampler in addition to analog modeling. The available filters also depend on the synthesis engine setting. It offers aftertouch expression and velocity expression. The Oasys keyboard offers a single GB of RAM standard that you can upgrade to 2GB. This device has no physical ROM. However, it does come with 314MB pre-loaded, which loads into its RAM at startup. You can add the optional 313MB EXs1 ROM Expansion and/or the 503MB EXs2 Concert Grand Piano. Depending on the amount of RAM installed, you can devote zero space to 1.5GB to saving user samples. The synthesizer features an internal 40GB hard drive with a 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor. Use it in 76-key or 88-key modes. This synthesizer comes standard with a 10.4-inch LCD touch screen. It also offers an input/output port and can be used with an external MIDI controller.

While some Korg keyboards use a standard operating system, the Open Architecture Synthesis Studio (Oasys) features a custom Linux operating system designed for expansion using a simple software update.

Korg also offers an optional EXB-DI add-on that provides 8 channels of ADAT Optical format 24-bit 48kHz digital output. It also provides word clock input, and the EXB-DI also works with the Korg Triton Studio keyboard and Triton Rack module.