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The user interface of this tablehooter is a bit awkward; the volume control it has no volume control buttons but the tempo +/- buttons serve this purpose when pressed while holding the "sound/ master vol." button (which normally switches cipher buttons to sound select mode). For rhythm/ accompaniment volume control hold down "rhythm/ acc. vol." instead (switches normally cipher buttons to rhythm select). Strange is that the latter does not control the bass volume of the accompaniments. Theoretically these 2 buttons could have been omitted anyway, because by the count of entered digits the hardware should recognize whether a sound or rhythm number is entered.
Despite the 160 main voice preset sounds include multiple variants of exciting names like "xylo spring", "analog", "fx piano", "cosmic", "fantasy", "fant. piano", "cosmic piano", "synth spinet", "space", "peak", "metal guitar", "odyssey" etc., they are all made from each a static digital 8 bit waveform (Hammond- like timbres; I found 21 of them in the ROM plus a sine wave among percussion samples that may be used as the base drum) combined with one of only few different attack- decay envelopes, thus most presets sound not remotely natural. It is not worth the effort to explain them in detail here, because at first hear they all simply resemble either cheap tooting analogue home organ tones or Rhodes piano sounds (with different decay rates), but unlike these they contain much digital aliasing noise. The preset sounds contain neither vibrato nor tremolo nor any pitch changes (not to say complex stuff like mandolin ring) and with sustain off all notes stop immediately after releasing a key. I guess they employ only about 5 different envelopes {envelope- less toot, toot with slower attack rate, 3 differently fast decay envelopes}. I consider this almost a fraud, because the sounds are way too similar to deserve 160 differently named ones (the individual sounds of an MC-3 differ more). Instead of this annoying pseudo- sound- bank Bontempi better should have added 4 synth buttons (envelope +/- and timbre +/- like the "voice variator" on Yamaha PSS-80) to combine every waveform with every envelope in an easy and logical usable way, but apparently Bontempi attempted to visually compete by raw force with Casio and Yamaha instruments although they had no technical means to do so. And by the too high preset volume the blatant sound flaws get even more obvious, because the thing always comes up at maximum volume after power- on, which makes the small speaker distort unless the digital volume control is set so low that the this way reduced bit resolution ruins the sound quality instead. Likely this was intended to yell together all shopping center customers to make them quickly turn their head and look for the sudden noise source, but I severely doubt that when found this made them in any way interested in buying one of these tablehooters - not to forget that it certainly made the shop staff as quickly decide to remove all batteries and power supply from such a roaring beast in the display shelf to make it stay quiet for the rest of the season until it collects dust. The peak of impudence is that Bontempi advertised this yelling beast on the box with the feature "high fidelity speaker for the best sound"; in the German language version instead it is called "Hochleistungs- Lautsprecher" (in English "high-power speaker"), which is at least a less incorrect description.
The percussion is monophonic and made from 8 bit low- res samples; especially the tom drum distorts extremely (clipping) and the cymbal decay phase drowns in hissing aliasing noise. The lo-fi drums sound quite fat and bassy and may be nice for tekkno. Annoying is that the tempo can be set not much lower than medium, although it can be otherwise set quite high.
The accompaniments of different rhythms contain different sounds and
are nicely made. There is even an "intro/ fill-in" button for the rhythms.
Without rhythm the accompaniment plays always the same organ chord timbre,
that makes a quiet popping noise during chord changes. The finger combination
to play a chord depends on "System 5 " knob setting. The mode "free chord
II" is classic fingered chord mode; you even can play any non- chord key
combinations, although with accompaniment plays monophonic with non- chords.
Without rhythm the organ chords hold until releasing all keys in the accompaniment
section. Like with Bontempi GT 509,
you can assign chords to 6 rubber button pads. For this set the "System
5" knob to "easy chord program", "single finger" or "free chord I" and
pressing "record". Then play a chord in the accompaniment section of the
keyboard and simultaneously press the pad you want to assign it to. Press
"record" again to finish. (Stored chords are erased by auto power-off.)
The demo music plays a very long medley of partly very short songs those employ standard accompaniments with monophonic main voice.
By the lack of external ROM, this model has even crappier low-res percussion (resembling Bontempi ES 3300). To camoflage its lousy timbres, Bontempi apparently designed it not to run without accompaniment, which can be circumvented.
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hardware detailsThe single chip CPU "Texas Instruments, COMUS2743244, D45007" (crystal clocked @ 25MHz) here is not socketed anymore. PCB and case layout were designed to have drumpads, those were omitted for cutting cost or avoid stressing the shameful percussion quality. As far I remember, even with added matrix diodes and jumpers the CPU does not recognize them. Unlike KS 4600 it lacks the external ROM; also this CPU looks like TMS320C1x family; which can have maximum 8KB internal ROM.
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Bontempi released many other keyboard variants with the same case design
like KS 4600 but different count of preset sounds, different controls
and often different sound generator. E.g. there is the Bontempi
KS 3400 (32 keys, smaller, no drumpads). Apparently the successor
series (blue pads and writing) were Bontempi AT 606 (32 keys, 60
sounds, 30 rhythms, buttons instead of knob, no drumpads), AT 707
(40 keys, 60 sounds, 30 rhythms, 30 "arrangements" (= accompaniments?),
drumpads left next to the speaker),
Bontempi BT 704 (40 keys, 24
sounds, 24 rhythms 6 combined drum/ chord pads),
BT 704/S (40 keys,
36 sounds, 24 rhythms). Later variants were already based on the nice sounding
666 sounds hardware like Bontempi GT
509 (with green panel stuff: Bontempi - Kids Music KT 32
(32 keys),
KM 40 (40 keys) | with blue panel stuff:
BT 605
(32 keys),
BT 705 (40 keys)) A smaller and even worse sounding keyboard
based on the KS 4600 sound engine was Bontempi
ES 3300.
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