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.

Jamie

September 23, 2010 @ 9:51 pm

I have one for sale if anyone is interested. All 4 sound blocks installed. Available for pick up in Orange County CA.

David

July 25, 2010 @ 10:59 pm

The Equalizer theme was done with a Fairlight CMI.

diddy

April 29, 2010 @ 5:56 pm

I had a k250 with a perfect 88 key keyboard. Amazing controller i wanted to keep it but its too big and my old lady made me take it to the electronic junk store. so sad

Micke

April 28, 2010 @ 4:40 pm

Also used by Joe Renzetti on the Poltergeist III soundtrack (1988).

Matt

December 6, 2009 @ 12:23 am

Used by The Beach Boys on their self-titled, Steve Levine-produced 1985 album. They did something weird with the backing vocals on that album. They used both this and a Fairlight CMI so they could very well have been sampled, I presume?

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