korg OASIS-OASYS (Score 1)

I remembe an old FAILED korg project called OASIS.. it was usual korg's many thousand dollars costing crap, just like zilog80-based trinity (slow&glitchy) tritons and the like things. All KORG stuff sounds features and looks are based to make good first impression. It failed due to the high price and th fact that it sounded good only when heavily tweaked. In fact, there was no way to tweak it (everything hidden and proprietary), and only "tweaks" were the DEMO sounds (formant-synthesis-based "arabian singer" one of the best of them). Sadly, most of the sound resembled simple wavetable stuff with some radical filtering or ringing applyed to them. KURZWEILs was having such sounds for many years at that time. (bonus point to them - they use their own ASICs and ideas as well es DIGITECH effects processors inside)

Korgs are mostly based on off-the-shelves texas instruments DSPs + from zilog80 to hitachi conroller, as well as other low-performance components. Also funny is their joint-venture with YAMAHA, another fantastic-sound-just-with-a-perss-of-a-single-butt on (for YAMAHAS these buttons are oftenly colored yellow!) music equipent manufacturer. Sometimes when you open a KORG you see (c)YAMAHA parts, and sometimes when you see YAMAHA keyboard you hear KORG's arranger patterns and timbres.

I expect this OASYS to be another failure, because it's just a PC with Linux and simplified old hardware OASIS card, and a hardware dongle for the software.