Now I use Addictive Keys which is immensely tweak-able. As far as the Kurzweil internal ROM pianos go I pretty much set it up and forgot about it. Mostly dropping the reverb. But on this Kurzweil there is a touch control that actually make the keys lighter or harder as well as the standard velocity curves, and there's even timbre and brightness settings. Well, there are times when I have the outboard audio parts of the studio turned off and I would just like to play the piano without having to load up my DAW or VST host (or waking everyone up with the Baldwin - I'll leave that to the cat who likes to climb up the curtains and jump onto the keys playing these wacky altered chords followed by some really strange scales at 4AM - he's no Cecil Taylor, tho') so I revisited the internal sounds straight through the board and played with all these tweaks. I got a really nice grand piano out of it that sounds really sweet and is very expressive with just the right amount of ambiance to feel like the real thing. Problem is it doesn't has no speakers so I still has to has at the least the mixing board up through the monitors! So much for that green thing. But wait. I have a pair of 6" two way monitors that have been collecting dust but I doesn't has no separate amp to use that doesn't has huge output wattage and loud-ass fans. But I found this little gem:
It's about just shy of 40w per channel and smaller than a deck of cards! $69 bucks! The power supply is bigger than the unit!
The research showed good so I went for it. Plugged in the SP-88, hooked up the monitors and Holy Crap! The sucker can shake the walls. The sound is a bit thin in the mids for a piano (maybe) but the highs and lows are clean and in your face but like any keyboard, will distort before the meters clip. At sane volumes I could actually hear the different key samples and their subtle nuances from key to key all across the keyboard! I could play around with the Kurzweil tweaks but I decided to insert a small Behringer mixer with some EQ on it to curve the balls in the mids like a solo grand piano should really sound (after adjusting the gains throughout this little audio chain to avoid distortion at the highest settings). This little brick is surprisingly loud and transparent. Now I really can go green and supplement the politically correct LED spots that I replaced the hot old hungry pars with! With freaking 36 Volts of power I can get balls loud with it and at less than 2 watts idling I can leave it on all the time (it does not even get warm to the touch). So with everything shut down in the studio I can play piano with the lights down low any time I want.
More info on this little beast is here:http://www.amphony.com/products/mini-amplifier.htm
