“I heard recently that I shouldn’t buy RAM for my Kurzweil sampler from a computer vendor. The person told me there was special RAM for my Kurzweil that I have to get. Is that right?”
No, not really, but there are issues with RAM. This is a blast from the past for us. This issue used to come up a lot more than it does now. These days RAM quality and pricing is relatively stable and consistent compared to five or so years ago. Back then a 4 MB chip could cost between $50 and $120 depending upon the source. Back then Kurzweils (and other music equipment) were much pickier about RAM than they tend to be these days. So it actually was relatively easy to buy RAM that would not work properly in a Kurzweil.
Unfortunately the rumor you heard may have originated with us, but it’s pretty far from what we would have ever said (you know how rumors are). Five or ten years ago most people thought RAM was just a commodity item, and the only differentiation was price. People still think that. It wasn’t true then and it still isn’t true now (though things are in general a lot more consistent now). We spent years trying to educate customers that they couldn’t just go buy any RAM they found and stick it in their Kurzweil. We repaired quite a few machines that were damaged from this back in those days. Most of the time the problems were much less dramatic, but still there were (and still are some) problems. These would range from overheating to samples that would get noisy and corrupted after being in the machine for a while. We had to constantly test and burn in our RAM to make sure it was working in machines. Of course it was one thing to get it to work in a stock machine, but then when you add four or five other options to the machine (thus putting more load on the power supply) RAM that otherwise seemed good would falter. It truly was a nightmare for us and many users in the field. The situation would sometimes be aggravated by the occasional know-it-all on a newsgroup: “I bought the cheap RAM from RAM R US and it worked fine in my machine. Sweetwater is full of…” Well sure, in some cases a particular chip may work fine, but later when options were added and a new OS installed it might not. The fact is, there were a number of chips that worked, and many that did not (even though some ‘appeared to’ for a while). We took a lot of abuse over this but held our ground and our customers had minimal or no problems.
There are a number of things that can cause RAM to work poorly or not at all in a particular machine. These include physical size of the chips, the power (current) draw they require, the speed of the memory chips, how hot they get, the types of components used to make the chip, the physical manufacturing of the memory board, etc. Many people erroneously think that speed is the only issue, but different manufacturing plants can make subtle decisions in how chips are built that definitely effect performance.
So, no, there are no special chips for Kurzweils, but you can’t just throw anything in there either. The newer K2500 and K2600 machines are much more forgiving than the original K2000 was, but given the relatively low cost of RAM today there is no logical reason to try to cut corners on any machine. However, it’s not as simple as just saying, “Buy the good stuff.” We’ve seen very expensive RAM fail as well, though MUCH less often. All we can tell you for sure is that we know the RAM we have works. If it ever doesn’t we will make it right. Is that special RAM? For the most part no, but a good deal of research goes into deciding what we carry. We communicate with our vendor on a regular basis, and there have actually been times where they’ve custom built RAM boards specifically for products we sell.
If you have RAM in your machine there are some symptoms you can look for to see if it is operating optimally. In a K2000 keep an eye on the display. If it’s erratic or fades, one of the causes is RAM that gets too hot (always have a fan kit installed if you have RAM installed). In any sampler – load up the machine to capacity with samples. Let it sit for a few hours or overnight, then play each of the samples back listening very carefully to the decay. If you hear clicks and pops or other strange noises as the level decays that can be (but isn’t always) faulty RAM. Usually (but not always) when RAM is the problem you don’t have to listen very hard to hear the corruption in the sounds.
