From EH@Ranger.enet.dec.comFri May 19 10:16:38 1995 Date: Thu, 18 May 1995 20:41:27 -0400 From: Eirikur Hallgrimsson To: electronica+@andrew.cmu.edu Subject: Re: The K4r and XD5 > ...are in fact identical except for silkscreening and wave rom content. Nope. The firmware is majorly different (diffident, also), too. It has to be to do the drumkit stuff. It's probably mostly the same under the UI. I keep trying to like the K4. There's a fair amount of my K1r on _Ballistic_. I really like the K1 (don't use it too much anymore, but go back to it for certain patches). The K4 just doesn't seem to have the same musicality, despite the added filters, etc. And that's with 16-bits, vs 8 (maxed-out via compression) in the K1. I played the K4 that was at the _Ballistic_ sessions. The electric piano patch is SUPERB. I couldn't get excited about anything else, though. Not even enough to try programming it. This is a mistake, because I didn't like my K1r very much (after the imfatuation) until I found tons of patches for it. "In tonnes, there will be found drams of interest." It is my personal theory, that following their paradigm of least-cost design (Kawai means cute in Japanese), that they have cost-reduced their sampling process, not to mention their memory usage. While the Spectra is 16-bit, it doesn't sound as good as a K1, and has shorter loops! I would have thought that the K4 would be a K1 on good drugs, but I haven't really gotten that impression. I own an XD-5, and claim that it is the ultimate Kawai synth. No LFOs at all! You need to get beyond the presets on it, too. Eirikur Eirikur Hallgrimsson eh@ranger.enet.dec.com Generic Epistemologist "Remember this, foolish mortals, when ye stare headlong into the mind-paralyzing void, the inky black nothingness of existence, the hellish yawning maw of the abyss -- it's pretty damn dark, so give it a few minutes for your eyes to adjust." Frank M. Carrano