OK... I've made a lot of headway with the 900 during 2 nights of work. It's amazing how much you lean when you HAVE to produce ... in my studio at home, there was no pressure ... no reactions ... on stage - it HAD to be right. So ... I switched mics (using the Beta58) and I tweaked the hell of of the settings till I found a moderately happy place.

*** Aw nuts - I had planned to post a few audio samples for you, but I saved them to the internal disk, and not to the USB stick that I took in the house with me. Silly rabbit. I'll try to transfer them tomorrow so I can share the results with you.

This Saturday is a very quiet dinner music deal ... should be a better test of the internal sounds and mic settings. The PA is set to minimal in this venue.

One thing I noticed that the MP3 playback is very weak. The SMFs play great in balance with the live sounds, but my MP3 audio trax all all very quiet ... even at the loudest setting. I'll have to look into that too.

HURRY!!

I have a concert at school tomorrow - after that, my schedule frees up a bit. It's been too hectic and I don't have time to set up the 900 just to transfer the files .. it's tucked away neatly in the trunk!

Wow, you left it in the trunk? You wouldn't do that here, it was 105 today, with heat index of 114!
I remember years ago a friend left his Technics KN800 in the trunk and the case melted almost entirely.
Glad you are enjoying the 900. Hope it works out for you.
DonM

Hey Don,

For once I can weather scoff you I've been sleeping with 3 blankets on most of the summer.....

I don't even OWN three blankets!

DonM

Too bad pa900 has no independent outs at least for vocal mic.

The T4 vocalizer >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN1Wa6OIwes

Nice

nice version but much too fast to dance to.

What's a blanket?

Some kind of empty disk drive?
DonM

I have tomorrow (Friday) off, so I'll experiment with the TC VocalLiveTouch2 ... see if it gets better tone from the direct inputs on the PA900. If its what I expect ... I'll post a few more comparison demos. I think the internal mic will only be good enough for background cocktail situations ... it just sounds too muffled for my taste. I've worked too hard on my voice to have it push a substandard mic input. Sorry Korg - you just didn't get this part right. Can we get a hardware/software upgrade to give the option of clean, crisp vocals to those of us who prefer internal speakers and lightweight? Please? ...(tap, tap. tap ... is this on????)


Oh yes ... another thing about the "in the trunk" comment - I never take my gear out of the car during my busy seasons, and I've never had one instance of trouble, due to temperature, on any gear in almost 40 years of carting that audio baggage around. My trunk is very kind to my rig.

Overall, have you played a good quality WAVE file through the internal speakers? Do they tend to 'color' the sound compared to a full range system? On the whole, I think we expect a bit much from rather small speakers in a VERY small enclosure.

One other possibility is, have you tried using a mixer's pre-amp to bring the mike up to line level? From what I can see at the Korg PA900 site's spec page is, the mike inputs are unbalanced:

Possibly a nice quality mike pre is needed? I have heard very good things about the Joe Meek ThreeQ (around $250 with a small footprint)

A quality mic pre is a definite possibility ... then I could turn OFF the dynamic processor that's built in.