Korg 01/W
The Korg 01/W showed up right at the start of the 1990s as a professional music workstation built around Korg's then-new AI2 synthesis. It kicked off a full line of 01/W-series instruments and won an award along the way. Korg's own advertising soon stretched the name into the Pro variant.
The 01/W has 32-voice polyphony, 16-bit linear PCM tone generators and a library of 340 waves. Effects are stereo. That's as deep as the documented spec sheet goes. Patch memory, MIDI implementation and keyboard action aren't recorded in the sources we've found.
The period record does show that the 01/W held its value well into the late 90s. British classified ads in Sound on Sound (1996, p.191) listed an immaculate, never-gigged 01/W at £875 ono. A boxed 01W/FD with manuals and demo disk still asked £950 by June of that year (p.210). By July 1998, a clean 01W/FD with both boxes and manuals had dropped to £749 (p.280). That's still serious money for a digital workstation nearly a decade old.
One owner on a Matrixsynth forum thread called the 01/W FD's electric pianos "gorgeous to die for." MusicRadar later included the 01/W in its list of the ten best Korg synthesizers of the 1990s.
Known specs:
- 32-voice polyphony
- AI2 synthesis with 16-bit linear PCM tone generators
- 340 internal waves
- Stereo effects
The 01/W FD variant (with floppy disk drive) shows up in period ads, but no dedicated spec sheet for it has surfaced. Production years are not firmly documented. The early-1990s release date is implied but not confirmed by any source.
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