Korg NTS-1: First look

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Just received the Korg NTS-1 Digital Synthesizer kit. Here’s the first pictures including a close-up look at the main logic board.

Korg NTS-1 kit

The kit arrives in a plain grey box with simple line graphics.

Inside the box, you’ll find the circuit boards to be broken apart and assembled, the ribbon strip, the corner brackets (spacers) and a short USB cable. There’s a short manual, a link to assembly instructions and the download code for the Korg software bundle. Sorry, you’ll have to buy your own kit to get a bundle code. 🙂

Korg NTS-1 kit contents

The NTS-1 hardware and Korg software bundle are well-worth the purchase price ($100 USD).

Korg NTS-1 front panel (pre-assembly)

We’ve all seen snaps of the front panel. This is a close-up. BTW, click on images in order to get full-res.

Korg NTS-1 front panel (rear view)

Yep, that’s an ST Micro STM32F030 (R8 LQFP-64, 64KB flash memory) on the back side of the front panel board. It’s an Arm® Cortex®-M0 core with a 12-bit ADC and other integrated peripheral interfaces. No doubt, it handles pot and button scanning, including the kit’s little ribbon control strip. The STM32F030 is part of ST’s “Value Line” and costs about $1.00 USD in quantity.

Korg NTS-1 main logic board

Ah, the money shot that we’ve all been waiting for. The main VLSI components are:

  • ST Micro STM32F446ZET6: Arm® Cortex®-M4 32-bit RISC featuring a single precision floating point unit (FPU), DSP instructions and a memory protection unit (about $5.00 in quantity) . The IC is a “system on a chip” with integrated flash memory and SRAM. Three low resolution ADCs and two low resolution DACs are included.
  • Integrated Silicon Solution Inc. (ISSI) IS42S16400J-6TL: 4Mx16 bit word 166MHz SDRAM (about $1.10 in quantity).

That’s a 24MHz crystal by the ARM processor. I haven’t done the maths, as yet, to compute the operational clock speed. Should be near the top-end for the chip, tho’.

There are two Asahi Kasei Microdevices (AKM) components:

  • AK 5358BET: 96kHz 24-bit stereo ADC (about $0.52 in quantity)
  • AK 4384ET: 106dB 192kHz 24-bit 2-channel DAC (about $0.63 in quantity)

Nice to see decent quality converters. Not high-end, but decent. Overall, it’s rarily about the component cost anymore — software and hardware development costs dominate.

The Texas Instruments TPA6138 is a pop-free stereo headphone amplifier.

As David sang, “If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.” Technology uncut.

Copyright © 2020 Paul J. Drongowski