im looking to buy korg triton..
but i see there is old triton, the newer korg taktile with same sounds and also korg triton rack

what should i seriously get? help

 

I had Korg Triton Pro either 76 or 88 key (I can't remember which) and loved the touchscreen on it but not sure if the others you mention have that option and it was pretty big too so might be something worth taking into consideration. It has some great sounds and love the Super Sweeper/Sweeper Strings Presets and many more.
Triton and Triton Extreme also available on sister site as VSTi (instruments) also by Korg themselves.
The TRITON Extreme is the most powerful model in the series, featuring the first-ever "Valve Force" vacuum tubes in a music workstation, and most of the new PCM and EXB-PCM series waveforms. The powerful, analog-like sound of vacuum tubes can be used with software for incredible sonic performance

 

i now own korg triton.. i must say i compared it to the VST... not really close .. the hardware is much better in sound quality.. even the inbuilt effects

 

nice

 

Mazal tov!

 

rack

 

Would you still hear the difference between them in a mix?

 

Original hardware always sounds better than any emulation, but software has decisive advantages: it's portable, cheaper, doesn't break, and takes up less space. Also, be prepared for future repair costs; replacement parts are also available on eBay, etc.

 

Can you provide a few clips of the same sound in both, so we can hear what you're talking about?

Not necessarily, and it depends somewhat on what you define as "better". Particularly with vintage digital, but even with the cheaper end analog synths - those things had all kinds of technical limitations resulting in sounds and behaviours which we today would feel were bad - poor quality convertors, low resolution and unsmoothed controls and so on. In some cases the software emulations of those things can improve on the originals in useful ways.

 

KORG TRITON Hardware vs Software SHOOTOUT

Let's compare the sound of the newly released KORG TRITON VST plugin from KORG COLLECTION 2 with an original hardware KORG TRITON CLASSIC synthesizer sampler workstation from 1999.
We'll play the same preset program and combi patches back to back on both instruments, comparing the sound of the drums, bass, pads, pianos and more.
Can you hear the difference?

 

I work with racks, rack can be nice, racks take less space.

 

Racks...who doesn't like a nice rack?

 

hardware has zero latency... and doesnt load the CPU tho

 

love the black boxies too

 

90s digital hardware, either played by internal keys or external MIDI definitely has latency. Especially rack devices always have MIDI latency which is rather high due to the slow data rate of MIDI and its processing.

 

after buying dance extreme 04 expansion board i acidentally overwrote 2 internal banks

now i have to buy floppy disks to do a full factory reset.. i wish this sample patch thing was automatic in the triton.. noo

 

I still have my Korg Trinity TR Rack that I bought in the 90's to use with my Ibanez IM-X 2010 MIDI guitar.

 

I always liked their sound so much and I found a cute triton variant called Korg karma on the vintage synth explorer in 2014 and how it sounded it really amazed me and bought one finally in 2017 and I replaced the floppy drive with the well known made in china USB floppy emulator for a chips price and it became my secret weapon even tho i still have not the Moss board or it's exapnssion cards but with some patient the vst triton came out and it had all the cards included but when I compared the same presets with the real triton karma it was completely different and a vaporwave artist of mine once said about the situation ":
These synth variants even tho the company said it's "Digital" but compare to our current timeline they are actually in many senses "analog"
I agree with that in a same way with the microkorg too, I mean the original one from 2002 and the vst versions...
I still use it the same way even as my sounddesign synth to make sounds from scratch with only the internal wavforms and I love how it sounds...

 

Last edited: Oct 12, 2025 at 5:42 AM

Cute? That was a cool synth, Jesus. They did not make all that many of them. I'd like a plugin version of it even, because why not? I'd like a plugin version of my Z1 too, but I think they maybe feel like that would not be for everyone as a plugin, because it wasn't really as a synth either. PM synthesis somehow became synonymous with really bad plastic sounding guitars.