Yeah I had both K5 and K1 for a while. If I remember correctly K1 was 4 part per voice, just 4 static spectra with an envelope for each and you could modulate two of them together which made some neat ringmod type effects.
It was advertised as an easier to program version of the K5, but in fact it was nothing like it.
Indeed, the only exciting thing was the ringmodulation imho. I would favour the K4 which at least offered the same with filters but I neither ownd one of these. The top was certainly the K3, an hybrid. It offers digital waves of which one of them could be changed and put it through analogue filters and amps, kinda the british OSCar. But it was rare and not so easy to find as the K4 when I was more in second hand gear. But I always love hybrid synths, offering best of both worlds. Have you ever put a pd patch through an analoge filter :)
The K5 had some really fancy breakpoint envelopes that were very flexible, with a kind of matrix to assign each env to one or more groups of sinewaves. It needed plenty of time and patience to program but made some sounds that were unrivalled at the time.
And the K5 had incredible aliasing (but I love intended aliasing). The K5000 is improved, a bit. You need SoundDiver to program it, otherwise you go crazy. A pd patch would be great but a lot of work (see the posts about the universal editor).
I also get those mixed up. The K2000 was a Kurtzweil now I recall, a development of the K1000 additive synthesiser. That one really had individual sines and was quite a beast.
The K1000 was are fine rompler for those who needed it. But the K150 was a so called Fourirsynth and always mystic for me, you needed an Apple II but I never found a screenshot. But now with the power of google and interweb you can download a pdf from the company themself.
http://www.kurzweilmusicsystems.com/support.html?Id=482
Check out also http://machines.hyperreal.org/manufacturers/Kurzweil/info/kurzweil.K-150.txt
The K2000 is sample based but they have some wired compression for the data under the hood which is certainly patented. It has filters which can be exchanged with other dsp processes like waveshapers (to get back on topic), which they called VAST (Variable Architecture Synthesis Technology) synthesis, long live marketing.
Sounds great, look forward to hearing that one.
I have a deep interest to (re)create some all-purpose synths (some with oldschool sound but also some with new methods) with pd recently, to get away from the 1 pd patch is 1 song paradigm which is inherent in all kind of modular synthesis. While its a need to record and break a patch on an actual analogue modular system, its not the case on the computerbased systems. But I know it from some Reaktor using friends and also from my Nord Modular habits. I usually create pieces from scratch and reuse only a little which is ok for a certain kind of music but waste for other as I noticed that I recreate to often the same patch. Biggest personal change is for me a rather tiny incident which happend recently. I use pd since late 90s but with an adventurous latency setting. Some weeks ago I installed 64Studio and happend the first time to have a computer with around 2ms latency, maybe even below but I didn't dared yet. So now the laptop reacts the same or better than my midi gear so hmmmm, the gear become a bit more obsolete. Or better, as I never sell equipment, pd and other audio software, or more precisly, the computerplatform underneath becomes that good.
I checked out some techniques to store parameters which is essential (for instance with the datastructs or a IEM external) and will soon share some patches with an insane drumsynthesizer and a warm polysynth (the ladder only for Linux because it is built around a nice LADSPA oscillator) which sounds a bit oldschool but sometimes I am in need for exactly that.
Biggest quest is to offer a good userinterface and a good mapping (hello Hans) of the parameters to the sweet spot, something which the big manufacturers had to face too. They even had to squish all to the 127 midisteps or, when I remember right, 99 steps in the case off Yamaha DX7. A great userinterface to additive synthesis was the Canadian Technos Acxel, I guess they used the LED as emitter and sensor trick which Jeff Hann demonstrated rather recently. But also great would be to have Jeffs multitouch screen for all kinds of userinterfaces, or maybe Reactable.
Cheers,
Malte
Malte Steiner media art + development -www.block4.com-