I’m not sure exactly how to take Korg’s ‘excuse’ for dropping the EC5. The ONLY components in it are five regular momentary switches, available anywhere. There’s no active circuitry, no power, nothing.

In fact, quite a few people have built their own EC5, it’s a very basic simple project. The six pin DIN plug is easy to source. I simply don’t buy Korg’s excuse. From what I remember, the plan was to use USB peripherals so pad banks, switches, even pedals could be integrated. And then the complexity of completely overhauling the OS left the question of peripherals on the back burner…

I have a feeling that these decisions were made before Covid screwed up supply chains, it’s no simple thing to retool the hardware design and drop the input, the PA5X’s specs were likely in place pretty early on.

But, bottom line, I always thought that only 5 switches always shortchanged the player, these are just too many things they can do. Even a basic scenario, where you use the switches do Variation selection (with auto-fill on) you’ve only got one left. My FC-7 for Roland’s had seven, so you could have three switches for anything else, and that seemed more usable.

But a larger problem still needed addressing. Iirc, both the Korg’s and Roland’s stored the footswitch assignments in ONE ‘global’ setting, which radically restricts the footswitch’s usefulness. I always wanted the FC-7’s setting stored with each Performance (correct me if Korg allows this), as the needs for style use, SMF use and live band use are all quite different (not much need for Variation selection when using a sequence!).

But noooooo..! 😡🤬

Those of us that come from organ backgrounds can do a lot with our feet! 😎🎹