Kurzweil PC2X
Eighty-eight fully weighted keys and a Fatar action that a working pianist called "very easy to play." The PC2X is the bigger, heavier successor to the PC88.
Overview
At 55 lbs, the PC2X is the heaviest of the PC2 line. It is the 88-note, fully weighted sibling to the 76-note semiweighted PC2. Both boards are velocity- and pressure-sensitive, and both carry the same engine, but the PC2X is the one aimed at pianists. Kurzweil's own advertising in the period positioned the PC2 Series as following on the design of the PC88, billing it as offering "more options and power than ever before" alongside "impressive master controller capabilities" (Mix (July 2002, p.17)). That's marketing copy, but the review press largely backed it up.
The action is the headline. Kurzweil had been working with Fatar on keyboard mechanisms for roughly eight years by the time the PC2X shipped, and the board uses Fatar's latest weighted mechanism, reportedly more rugged than the PC88's. Electronic Musician (the PC2X review ran in the magazine's pages) put a real pianist in front of it. He owned a K2500XS and described the feel as "nice," with more give than the older PC88. It was a touch floppier and not quite as smooth or even as the PC88, but very easy to play. This is not a PC88 with more keys bolted on, and players who loved the PC88's action may notice the difference. Individual units varied too, since the same mechanism in a K2500X apparently felt different again.
Under the hood the PC2X runs a sample-playback engine with 64 voices, expandable to 128, across 16 multitimbral parts and four zones. The program count is generous for the era: 128 ROM sample-based programs plus 128 user RAM slots, 16 ROM KB3 organ programs plus 128 user KB3 slots, and 32 ROM setups plus 128 user setups. The KB3 organ modeling, including a rotating speaker simulator, earned particular praise in the Electronic Musician review. The pipe organ drew special mention and the KB3 rotary effect was judged to work very well. The criticism was just as specific: the preset organ sounds were called a bit too clean, short on grunge, though distortion is there to dial in if that's the sound you want.
Pianos are the reason most players bought it. The Solo Grand Piano got an immediate "very, very nice," and most of the other acoustic pianos, many using multi-velocity keymaps, were well liked. Electric pianos were more of a mixed bag. Some sounded good in the midrange but thin on top, while the Dyno My EP and Big Red Wurly stood out as big and fat across their whole range. The clavinet sounds reportedly came close enough to a real clav that a player who owns one was convinced.
Connectivity is serious for a master controller. Two balanced ¼" TRS analog outputs and a ¼" TRS headphone jack sit alongside a digital RCA output running AES/EBU or S/PDIF at 48 kHz and 16-, 18-, 20-, or 24-bit resolution. MIDI In, Out, and Out/Thru are all present, plus three ¼" TS footswitch jacks, two ¼" TRS continuous footpedal jacks, a ¼" breath-controller jack, and a ribbon-controller jack. The panel has pitch-bend and modulation wheels, four data sliders, and five panel switches. The effects section is deep, with 163 presets covering reverbs, delays, choruses, flangers, phasers, tremolos, panners, filters, distortion, rotary speakers, compressors, enhancers, waveform shapers, and combinations.
The physical package is 54.31" long, 4.31" high, and 14" deep at 55 lbs, a full 16 lbs heavier than the 76-note PC2. There's no removable storage, so the user RAM lives and dies with the machine unless you dump it via MIDI. That's a real limitation for anyone building a live set around custom programs and setups, and collectors should check it before buying used.
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