Korg B-402
A Korg product that survives in the historical record mainly as a line item on a 1990 mail-order ROM price list — which tells you more about the era's patch economy than about the thing itself.
Overview
Nearly everything the archive can confirm about the Korg B-402 comes from a single kind of document: the Valhala mail-order listings that ran in Mix magazine through the second half of 1990. Those advertisements were not reviews and not spec sheets — they were catalogs of third-party synthesizer voice data, and the B-402 appears there not as a synthesizer in its own right but as a diskette of sounds for Korg instruments.
The listings are consistent on the essentials. Valhala sold "Korg International Gold disks B-401 & B-402" at $45.00 each, alongside Korg voice ROMs at $45.00 and Korg International Gold ROMs at $50.00. The Canadian Musician versions of the same ad are explicit that "Korg TD-1 thru TD-4, B-401 and B-402 are diskettes" — a useful clarification, since the surrounding catalog mixes physical ROM cards with floppy-based products and the distinction matters to anyone trying to track one down today. Mix (1990, p.44) carried the same lineup, with the B-401 and B-402 disks priced at $45.00 apiece.
What the B-402 actually contained is where the record goes quiet. The ads group it under the "International Gold" banner, which in Valhala's scheme denoted a premium voice bank, but no surviving excerpt names the instruments it was voiced for, the number of patches on the disk, or the format it was written in. The fact sheet for this model is empty of verified specifications — no dimensions, no production years, no original list price from Korg itself. What exists is the reseller's price and the reseller's description, and that is the whole of it.
That thinness is itself worth noting for what it says about how this gear circulated. A product like the B-402 lived entirely inside the aftermarket. Valhala's ads ran month after month in Mix — the September, October, November, and December 1990 issues all carry the same block — and the copy makes clear these were direct-order goods: "available direct only — not in retail stores," with a Michigan phone number for Visa and MasterCard orders and a $20 minimum charge. Buyers in 1990 who wanted the B-402 disk were not walking into a Korg dealer. They were calling Ferndale.
Collectors chasing one today should expect the same problem that dogs all floppy-based patch libraries: the medium outlives the documentation. A disk survives or it doesn't, and without a confirmed instrument list, matching a loose B-402 to the right Korg synth is guesswork. The archive has no confirmed production years, no confirmed patch count, and no confirmed compatibility — only the price, the format, and the fact that it shipped under the International Gold name.
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