Kurzweil K2500RS

A rack sampler that shipped with 48 voices, dual SCSI ports, and a deep upgrade path.

Overview

The K2500RS is the sampling-equipped rack unit of Kurzweil's K2500 series, a line of music workstations built around the company's V.A.S.T. (Variable Architecture Synthesis Technology) engine. Kurzweil's own advertising billed the K2500R and K2500RS as "the production station" - the pitch being that a project could go from conception to completion without leaving the instrument. That claim ran in EQ Magazine (September 1995, p.53) and again in Mix Magazine (November 1995, p.169). Kurzweil was selling a self-contained production environment in a rack, not a preset box.

The "S" in the model name is the important part. The K2500 series shipped in several configurations - 76-key (K2500), 88 weighted-key (K2500X), and rackmount (K2500R) - and full sampling was reserved for the S variants: the K2500S, K2500RS, and K2500XS. So the RS is the rack without keys but with sampling on board. The SMP-2 sampling option added digital and optical I/O, plus a sample-while-play feature that let a user record samples while continuing other operations.

The synthesis engine is the same V.A.S.T. architecture that made the K2000 series popular, and Kurzweil's literature describes the K2500 line as building on that foundation. V.A.S.T. offered 60 DSP functions arrangeable in 31 algorithms. In practice that means different methods of synthesis can be used within the same program. The K2500RS can also load samples in most formats - DOS, AIFF, WAV, Roland, Akai, and Ensoniq are all named in Kurzweil's material - and process them through V.A.S.T.

Polyphony was 48 voices. Sample RAM maxed out at 128 MB. The base ROM held 8 MB, expandable to a maximum of 28 MB through Kurzweil's ROM SoundBlocks - the Orchestral ROM, Contemporary ROM, or Stereo Digital Piano sets, which together offered 28 MB of the company's sample library. Program memory ran up to 1.26 MB. There was a 32-track sequencer on board, 28 on-board effects algorithms, and dual SCSI ports for storage. The operating system lived in flash ROM, upgradable from floppy disk or over SCSI. Kurzweil made their floppy disks MS-DOS compatible.

The display was a fluorescent 64 x 24D backlit unit, and the machine carried full MIDI controller capabilities and an Advanced File Management System (AFMS). It shipped with a new soundset of 200 programs and 100 setups, plus a separate disk containing 1,000 useful programs, so the buyer wasn't starting from an empty rack.

The upgrade path is the long-term story. Kurzweil promised several optional boards, including the KDFX digital effects option (four stereo buses and state-of-the-art DSP) and the DMTi Digital Multitrack Interface, which offered four stereo channels of digital format and sample rate conversion in real time for direct connection to Alesis ADAT and Tascam DA-88 machines. Sound On Sound (October 1995, p.88) noted that Kurzweil were promising future upgrades including the KDFX board with direct digital output and digital stereo insert, plus an 8-channel interface. The magazine also observed that software releases were available from an on-line communications service.

Pricing at launch put the K2500RS at $3,495 with 2 MB of RAM, plus another $695 for the sampling option - figures reported in Electronic Musician's comparison of the K2500RS against E-mu's e-64. That comparison framed the K2500RS as a live/studio combo and the e-64 as more of a studio tool. The Kurzweil's advantages were ROM-based sounds, internal signal processing, and twice the maximum RAM capacity (128 MB against the e-64's 64 MB). The e-64 claimed more polyphony at 64 voices against the Kurzweil's 48.

The upgrade ecosystem - SoundBlocks, the sampling option, the KDFX board, the DMTi interface - means no two examples are necessarily alike, and a unit's actual value depends heavily on what's installed. The flash ROM OS and MS-DOS-compatible floppies make software updates less painful than on some contemporaries, and the dual SCSI ports allow period-correct storage. The 48-voice count and 128 MB ceiling are modest by later standards.

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Kurzweil K2500RS

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