Kurzweil K250

One of the first keyboard samplers, it was great then and still good today. It has an adjustable sample rate of 5kHz to 50kHz which means 100 to 10 seconds of sampling time, respectively. Its sampler was also 16-bit. Many other samplers of this time had much more limited sampling/digital audio specs which made this synth a very prominent keyboard. By todays standards, however, this synth has many limitations such as samples are stored directly on Apple Mac disks only. But it had extremely modern features that make this synth easy to use and quite versatile.

It has a 12-track sequencer, chorus, transpose, tune, 36 ROM sounds, 96 pristine quality acoustic instruments, 341 presets, 12 voice polyphony, 2 LFO's per voice, variable sampling rate, truncation, looping, velocity crossfading, full 88 weighted keyboard, MIDI and more! Of course the newer K2000 series is supposed to be better, but the K250 still seems like a major contender even in todays modern synthesizer era. It was also available in keyboardless Expander or as a rackmount module. It has been used by Stevie Wonder, Sean Hopper, Richard Wright, Patrick Moraz, Paul Shaffer, Lorin Hollander, Michael Kamen, Vangelis, Kitaro, and John Carpenter.

21 Visitor comments

EBK

October 16, 2009 @ 10:35 am

Virginvoice - I have one of these too. I'm trying to revive it and maybe connected it to modern computer stuff - Logic Pro or even Garageband.

Micke

June 25, 2009 @ 7:34 am

I was under the impression The Equalizer theme was done with a Fairlight CMI but who knows....

virginvoice

June 19, 2009 @ 2:18 pm

This is an amazing sythn that I still use today in my studio....made famous for use for the TV show "Equalizer" theme.

Micke

June 17, 2009 @ 10:43 am

To the list of K250 users we can add Lyle Mays.

Micke

June 13, 2009 @ 12:00 pm

Also used by Queen, John Harrison (Day Of The Dead OST, 1985), John Massari (Killer Clowns OST, 1988), and Alan Howarth & John Carpenter (Big trouble in little china, Prince of darkness, Retribution OST's etc.)