Korg PS-3300

The sources the Archive holds say little about the Korg PS-3300, but here is what survives. It was the largest of Korg's three PS-series synthesizers, above the PS3100 and PS3200. Sound on Sound (February 2001, p.257), looking back at the line, called the PS instruments difficult to assess. They were unquestionably unwieldy, and apart from the PS3200's 16-memory patch storage, they had no memories for the user's crafted sounds. The same retrospective credited them with a lot of sound-mangling potential, a very playable keyboard, and plenty of knobs to twiddle.

The article was harder on the PS-series filter. Sound on Sound (February 2001, p.255) called it the biggest disappointment on these synths, since it made classic big filter sweeps very hard to produce. Modulation control, however, was counted as a plus. A contemporaneous survey entry in Studio Sound (February 1981, p.58) appears to list a large filter complement - lowpass and highpass sections with resonance, and a cutoff slope starting at 12 dB/octave and steepening to 18 dB/octave. The entry is fragmentary.

The PS line was quietly dropped in 1980-81, and Korg settled into the more mainstream Poly 6/61 and DW series. For owners who later wanted one in a modern studio, Sound on Sound reported that Kenton Electronics offered a retrofit providing MIDI In for note on/off messages. Precise production years, original pricing, and a full specification record remain undocumented.

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Korg PS-3300 Polyphonic Analog Synthesizer Full Scale Reissu
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