Group - Kurzweil K250

The Kurzweil K250 a.k.a. "Kurzweil 250", "K250" or "K-250", manufactured by Kurzweil Music Systems was the first electronic musical instrument which produced sound derived from sampled sounds (see:Sampler (musical instrument)) burned onto integrated circuits known as Read Only Memory (ROM) without the requirement for any type of disk drive. Acoustic sounds from brass, percussion, string and woodwind instruments as well as sounds created using waveforms from oscillators were utilized. Primarily designed for the professional musician, it was conceived and invented by Raymond Kurzweil, original founder of Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc., Kurzweil Music Systems and Kurzweil Educational Systems with consultation from Stevie Wonder, twenty-two time Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter and music producer; Lyle Mays, an American jazz pianist; Alan R. Pearlman, founder of ARP Instruments Inc.; and Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer. In 1982 Stevie Wonder asked Raymond Kurzweil if we could use the extraordinarily flexible computer control methods on the beautiful sounds of acoustic instruments Raymond Kurzweil utilized fundamental sampling concepts first engineered in reading machines for the blind (such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine) and adapted them for musical purposes. Reading machines work by sampling characters found in a document or text of some sort at pre-programmed intervals to reproduce a usable image of a document without any noticeable loss in intelligibility. The reading machine then converts the image into digital data (see:digitizer), stores the digital data onto Random Access Memory (RAM) and/or Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EPROM) and presents the finished product as spoken text via a text to speech synthesizer. The Kurzweil K250 utilized a similar concept: Sounds were sampled, converted into digital data, stored onto Read-Only Memory (ROM) and are reproduced as sound. A prototype of the Kurzweil K250 was manufactured for Stevie Wonder in 1983. It featured Braille buttons along with sliders (potentiometers) for various controls and functions, an extensive choice of acoustic and synthesized sounds to choose from, a sampler to record sounds onto RAM and a music sequencer utilizing battery-backed RAM for compositional purposes. During production of the Kurzweil K250 at least five units were manufactured for Stevie Wonder. The Kurzweil K250 was officially unveiled to the music industry during the 1984 Summer NAMM trade show. Shortly thereafter the Kurzweil K250 was commercially manufactured until 1990 and was initially available as an 88-key fully-weighted keyboard and as an expander unit without keys called the Kurzweil K250 XP. A few years later into production a rack mount version called the Kurzweil K250 RMX a.k.a K250 X also became available.