Vintage Synth Explorer

Forgot to mention--Kawai will still support machines this old. Ask them for ROM upgrades and they will hook you up. All praise to Kawai tech support.

This is a really underappreciated, wonderful machine. And there are a lot of lies and half-truths being spread about it by reviewers. It can transmit and receive on MIDI channels other than 10, contrary to what others say. It does not sound thin and delicate unless you program it that way--you can create some mindblowing kicks with it. Sure, a manual helps, but it's not incredibly difficult to program on pure intuition either. Download the manual, give it a glance, and you'll understand Kawai's methods.

I'll grant that the construction leaves a little to be desired--it has a PLASTIC FACE--on a damn rackmount box! PLASTIC POTENTIOMETER HANDLES, ugh! But it seems solid enough, the plastic is still pretty thick and you'd need real effort to break it especially in a rack. Features more than make up for this small weakness though--I'd recommend it to anyone.

I purchased this drum module back in the day, it was underestimated, the magic word for this piece is drum synthesis, for the most part you can create most any drum sound you desire. It has a sound of its own similar to a mpc60. I have use this piece for years and its a very vital part of my production.

I bought one of these in um, 1996 maybe?
The filters are loverly and squelchy and you can fiddle with them on the fly with the slidely knob

My buddy and I bought the XD-5 at Guitar Center back in the early 90's on some kind of super blow out deal they were having. I don't Kawai was really ever known for it's drum modules so this thing was never very popular. The sound quality of the samples is fairly decent, but not completely on par with the R8 or SR-16 of the era. Strengths of the XD-5 include a decent "synth style" filter and a good diverse sample set.