This is a variant of My Music Center with a beautiful oval case with 8 animal face keys. By its shape this case was likely originally created for Stereo Playkeys!, since the animals correspond exactly to the animal voices of the latter. The case also has 2 speaker grills although only one speaker is built-in. The plastic smelled a bit bad of solvents when new and the power switch was oiled so much with petrol (motor oil?), that I had to clean it with isopropanol to make proper contact. The brand name on the box is in Chinese and there is a little comic boy on the brand label.

main features:

• beautiful red and white plastic case (2 blue, round speaker covers with a yellow "F" and "Y" shaped grill on them).
• 32 mid size keys (those need to be pressed slightly harder than usual).
• 2 voice polyphony (1 when rhythm plays)
• 8 OBS instrument sounds {guitar, flute, bell, mandolin, saxophone, violin, accordion, piano} ("accordion" is the same as "organ" in "My Music Center". The mandolin doesn't ring.)
• 8 OBS rhythms (boring low- res PCM drums with switchable monophonic fixed- key accompaniment.) {twist, rock, disco, tango, waltz, rumba, bassa-nova, mash-potato} Rhythms start always with default tempo and accompaniment on, which makes the OBS selection rather useless for tekkno performances.
• 4 drum pads + selection button to switch them between drums or 4 additional instrument sounds {ghost, police car, ambulance, telephone} . The "ghost" sound is very melodic, rastered and sounds fantastic; it resembles a glass harmonica with a squarewave vibrato. (These extra instruments can not be played with rhythm.)
• monophonic sequencer for 38 notes or drum pad events exists (quite useless because contents is erased as soon anything else but "play" is pressed). It plays back in a loop, but can not be combined with the given rhythms, nor can be played to it.
• custom drummer for a 16 step rhythm pattern (Press "program", then enter rhythm by drum pads. Use "replay" for pauses. After 16 events the rhythm starts automatically.) Rhythm can not be stopped without erasing it.
• "chord" on/ off button.
• "magic" button to play the demo melodies note by note in "one key play" mode.
• digital volume control buttons
• The 4 channel sound generator synthesizes each main voice sound by layering 2 waveform samples those have a digitally switched envelope (with well audible ticking zipper noise). The waveforms on both channels are detuned to create a chorus effect. In the demo tunes the 2 subvoices of each main voice sound are split to enable the sound generator to play 4 note polyphonic musics (without chorus). Percussion and effect samples use the same 4 channels.
• The CPU contains a 1 bit pulse width modulation D/ A converter which outputted sequences of on/ off pulses get turned into analogue wave forms by a capacitor. This sample output frequency intermodulates higher notes and gives them an unusual glassy timbre.
• CPU "W-51A" (22 pin COB module) with DC voltage controllable clock oscillator
• 2 nice classic demo melodies with accordion sounds. It even can be played to them; when keys are pressed, the main voice stops for one bar. Funny is that the 2nd tune (Al Turca) seems to have a pattern bug; it repeats its final bar at a wrong place.

eastereggs:

• a lovely(!) sounding squarewave envelope vibrato found. Because this also disables one of the 2 suboscillators of the voices, it constitutes basically a complete alternative set of 8 additional wonderful OBS sounds, those resemble much C64 SID lead sounds.
• 5 additional higher note keys addable.
• pressing "drum/ se" and various keys simultaneously results in strange crash sounds.

Here you see the pitch controls, volume knob and the additional key buttons added by me.

modifications:

• cinch sound output, speaker mute switch and AC adapter jack with regulator added.
• vibrato button added ("demo" was connected to 3 buttons =>traces from 2 of them cut and re-wired).
• 5 black and red buttons at the right case rim as additional keys added. -volume pot with shielded cable added. This instrument had an ugly chirping background noise, which disappeared after adding the pot.
• 2 pitch preset pots and a "pitchbend arm" consisting of a pot and and a plastic lever with a microswitch on its lower side mounted left next to the keyboard. Ba pressing the arm down, the switch selects between both pitch (clock voltage) settings. A rotary 2 position switch selects between 2 modes (arm changes pitch only when not pressed, or in both positions).

notes:

The "flute" has a nicely realistic weak hiss component and resembles wooden organ pipes. The "saxophone" resembles a bit a reed organ or melodica. The effect preset sounds can not be used together with rhythm or vibrato. Particularly great is here the "ghost" sound, which is a fading tone with long attack phase like a bowed glass, but with very strong square vibrato. In opposite to the disharmonic "ghost" sounds on many other keyboards this one plays wonderfully melodic and in tune, which is very unusual. The "ambulance" is a tone that toggles between 2 notes; quite interesting is that the toggle timer resets by every new note, thus it does not toggle during fast play or trilled notes, which permits some interesting play techniques. The "telephone" is a fast digital dual tone telephone ring sound which ends after about a second. The "police car" is a harsh siren.

This wonderful instrument seems to be very rare; I bought the last in a shop which never got new ones, and unlike My Music Center I yet nowhere saw any others. But I once saw a My Music Center version with the same start-up jingle (recognizable by the sound presets labelled "flute" and "saxophone", red case like the normal My Music Center), thus I am not sure how much similarities these have or if they were even the same hardware class. (I only quickly tested it in a turkish shop, but didn't examine it closer.) Also at eBay I saw later this My Music Center variant, and by the description it is likely the same hardware class like my Musical Centre. A direct successor of the Musical Centre hardware may be the bizarre Jin Xin Toys JX-20165 (which has 36 sound variants).

Attention: At eBay I saw a black rectangular toy keyboard that is also named "Musical Centre", but it seems to be just a Yongmei hardware variant (see here) that has absolutely nothing to do with this one.
 

removal of these screws voids warranty...
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