Yes, it's *that* Kurzweil. But he sold the company off almost as soon as it started. Dr. K made a big splash in the 1970s with his products for vision-impaired people. I think it was "Reading Edge", or some such thing? Basically they were an appliance which combined a photoscanner, OCR, and speech synthesis. A person could place a printed page on the plate and have it read to them! One of his most famous customers was Stevie Wonder, and they rapped about the possibilities of digital music, and this is - as legend has it - how the synth company started. Early on they were sold to Young Chang piano company, in Korea. The K150, and many of their other early projects, were actually designed by Hal Chamberlin. Hal moved from Waltham Mass to Korea where he worked for nearly ten years. He also wrote a book called "Musical Applications of Microprocessors" which is essential reading for anybody interested in building electronic instruments.
The synth does sound really cool. I especially love weird pitchdown of the piano. Also it uses a lot of current! I don't remember, maybe it's all TTL in there... And the high-frequency cutoff is really low, like just a few kilohertz. Great for experimental basslines though. It is definitely unique. And fairly cheap, too, since nobody can edit theirs! I rarely see them go for more than $200.
What Hal told me years back was that the MIDI interface is used in playback mode for regular MIDI, but in edit mode for regular serial communication. He said that the SMP program was done in 6502 assembly with some funky macros and was neither well-commented, nor easy to reverse-engineer. If I ran the software and monitored the serial data, I am sure I could make an updated editor. Otherwise, probably not. I have used Sounddiver, but never made a module for a new instrument. SD is getting pretty obselete itself, sadly. My Logic XSkey lets me use the last beta Emagic made. More likely I would use Max to help parse the serial, and test out the ideas, and prototype an editor.
Alas, I am too broke now even to buy an old Apple, unless I find one at a tag sale. Maybe in a few months. I should play it again soon!
The synth does sound really cool. I especially love weird pitchdown of the piano. Also it uses a lot of current! I don't remember, maybe it's all TTL in there... And the high-frequency cutoff is really low, like just a few kilohertz. Great for experimental basslines though. It is definitely unique. And fairly cheap, too, since nobody can edit theirs! I rarely see them go for more than $200.
What Hal told me years back was that the MIDI interface is used in playback mode for regular MIDI, but in edit mode for regular serial communication. He said that the SMP program was done in 6502 assembly with some funky macros and was neither well-commented, nor easy to reverse-engineer. If I ran the software and monitored the serial data, I am sure I could make an updated editor. Otherwise, probably not. I have used Sounddiver, but never made a module for a new instrument. SD is getting pretty obselete itself, sadly. My Logic XSkey lets me use the last beta Emagic made. More likely I would use Max to help parse the serial, and test out the ideas, and prototype an editor.
Alas, I am too broke now even to buy an old Apple, unless I find one at a tag sale. Maybe in a few months. I should play it again soon!