I first heard about the Kurzweil 250 early in the spring of 1983, a little while after Kurzweil Music Systems went public. Nobody had seen one yet. The buzz was that it was a digital sampling keyboard that had done the Emulator one better, that the company was claiming it could absolutely reproduce the sound of a grand piano (to the point of winning blindfold tests), that it would cost about $7,000, and that it would be on the market in the fall of 1983.

Awfully brave words, those, for an unknown company. But they had some powerful circumstantial backing. Chief of development for the project was Phil Dodds, well-known in the field for his years at ARP and his virtually single-handed rescue of the Chroma when ARP collapsed. And Ray Kurzweil – founder of the project, president of the company, and source of the instrument's name (the "250" is just a development code number that stuck) – was a big presence in the computer field, especially in that part of it known as AI (Artificial Intelligence).

But for many months it was "prototype" never "production". Whither Kurzweil? Or was it going to be "wither" Kurzweil, as had happened with so many other promising but ultimately non-existent instruments in the digital synthesis field, such as the Coupland, the Synthia, and the Prism?

Well, I'm pleased to report that as of summer '84 the Kurzweil 250 is beginning to ship... sort of. The first instruments are going out to big-name customers like Stevie Wonder and Sting. Major retailers are beginning to see demonstrator units. Other Big Names from the history of synths have come on board, like Alan R Pearlman and Bob Moog. And at the summer NAMM Kurzweil had two production models – not prototypes – that though, not sounding as blissfully wonderful as the externally-linked prototype, still sounded wonderful indeed.

I finally got to go up to the main company offices in Waltham, Massachusetts, and dig into the 250 in person.

First impressions: black, well-made, black, elegant, black, expensive, BLACK. Also huge. It has an 88-key keyboard with a very realistic piano action. In fact, it kind of looks like a Steinway for the 1990s.

First impressions of the sound, based on a demo and a tape of Lyle Mays playing two 250s together without any overdubs: YUM. They were all good, especially the brass (it seems to be a digital speciality). And while the piano sound wouldn't win any blindfold tests against a real grand if they were pitted against one another in the same room, it would win in direct comparisons with the sound of a recorded piano. Quite uncanny, the illusion, because when you shut your eyes you felt you were listening to a pianist being piped in from studio to control room over the monitor system. The demo ran the gamut of the instrument's basic sounds and a few silly things, like a collection of dialogue and sound effects from the Three Stooges. It proved the 250's capacity to be a powerful performing, orchestrating, and recording tool.

So what's in it, aside from lots of circuitry and 256K memory chips? And what's it do? And what does it actually cost, now that instruments are going out the door?

Price for the stock model, which includes 30 resident sounds, 12-note polyphonicity, a 12-track 4000-note sequencer, layering of up to six instrument sounds on a single key, MIDI, three layers of software chorusing, and a lot of other nifty features (including the capacity to put a different instrument on every single key, if that's what you get off on)... $10,750.

If you want to sample for yourself (and incidentally increase sequencer memory to the range of 20,000 notes and up) you can do so by purchasing the sampling option, which will cost $2,000 to $2,500 plus an Apple Macintosh.

The company explains their Macintosh decision reasonably enough. At the heart of both the Mac and the 250 is the Motorola 68000 chip, a 32-bit processor, and by rights they should work together a lot more powerfully than the 250/IBM PC package would have... but it also says three other things to me. One, the IBM PC implementation was never as far along as Kurzweil originally claimed, or else it wouldn't have been shoved into limbo so rapidly instead of being brought to market. Two, if the company will ballyhoo a product as intensely as it did the 250/PC link and then pull out, the same thing could happen with anything else that is being advertised as available or "soon-to-be" available. And three... well, hell! The Mac only came out a few months ago. Which means they started all over from scratch with an interface. Which means it will probably be a long time before the system is debugged enough to get into beta test, let alone out into the real market place... and what do all the people who want to do their own sampling do in the meantime? (Buy an Emulator II, of course. A lot of the Kurzweil marketing decision seems to be deliberately calculated to make the folks at E-Mu grin from ear to ear.)

There is another approach to getting new sounds, and that's to buy a ROM cartridge from Kurzweil. This is not your typical microcomputer ROM cartridge, since the sound storage runs to the general range of a megabyte or more. Instead, it's a large, flat, black box that will retail (depending on who you ask and when) for $650 to $900. Just how many sounds will be available in this additional library, and when, are questions to which there are no certain answers. In the meantime fun can be had with the stock sounds, which are as follows: concert grand piano, violin section, viola section, cello section, bass section, plucked acoustic bass, snare drum, bass drum, two-octave chromatic tom, open hi-hat, closing hi-hat, closed hi-hat, crash cymbal, cowbell, sandpaper, three different Hammond B-3 organs settings without percussion and one with, trumpet, baritone horn, valve trombone, sine wave, "endless glissando", classical guitar, hand claps, finger snaps, temple blocks, grater up, and grater down. (Does that list look as odd to you as it does to me? Where are the woodwinds? It's a schizoid collection, sort of half-aimed at the orchestrator and half-aimed at the pop/rock arranger. Odd.)

To the 250's credit, you can do a hell of a lot with the sounds that are in it. It is a sampling machine, yes (or at least a sample-playing machine) – but it is also quite a capable digital synthesiser. In fact, the entire basis for what it does is a kind of pattern-recognition synthesis derived from AI techniques in which the internal microprocessor can interpolate a sound from an onboard model of the way an instrument actually operates. What this means is that when you strike a key and hear a piano note the 250 isn't just kicking back a pre-recorded sample at you. Instead, it is looking at a complex set of samples – samples across a range of pitches, or the same pitch struck at different velocities – and figuring out an artificial approximation of what a real piano struck on the same key and with the same force would sound like. In that sense, the 250 is a magnificent illusionist. It has to be. In order to do the same thing with the brute force method of packing in more RAM, you'd need many megabytes just to record a single note successfully... then multiply that by 88.

What this synthesis capability gives you is the chance to take the natural sound models and play many weird games with them, things like frequency modulation and step detuning, and extremely precise envelope control. And then for performance and recording madness there are three sliders, two levers, and two piano-style footpedals that can have a wide variety of standard and not-so-standard functions assigned to them, like filter sweeps, sustains, and frequency and amplitude modulations.

The big question is not whether the instrument is good. It is. What remains to be seen is whether or not the company itself can support the promise of the instrument by getting the secondary systems (sampling, the computer interface, a greater sound library) into place.

Kurzweil digital keyboard $10,0001