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In-depth Feature:
Kenton Plugstation
Yamaha SWG PLG Expansion Player
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The Kenton Plugstation is one darn good idea, it's cheaper and takes up less space than equivalent hardware synths.
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Introduction
There can be few of us who would not wish to have access to a whole bunch of synths for their different sonic capabilities and the possibilities of building some texture into a track. Once upon a time such capability would have involved a large stack of bulky keyboards taking up most of the room space, then things got a little better when rack mounted modules came along, nowadays, however, small is beautiful and you can make the most of your space simply by using a stack of software synths nestled securely on your computers hard drive. Now, space-saving they might be, but, as anyone who has used a bunch of these little gems together will know, your CPU processor power soon takes a hammering and then there's that pesky latency thing and the competition for audio outputs.
Clearly if someone could come up with a way to provide a heap of synths each with separate audio outputs in a physical, yet space saving form that put little or no strain on your CPU and played with perfectly tight timing, the world would become a much better place and we could all live happily ever after. Yeah right. Well, surprise, surprise, someone has done it. That someone is Kenton Electronics and they have done it by taking a sideways look at existing and proven technology. Yamaha already provided a DSP version of their MU100R synth on their SW1000G soundcard which also smartly featured a PLG daughter board socket for adding an expansion board containing yet another synth. Now that's two hardware synths inside your computer - as long as you have a SW1000G that is, but what if you want more than two? Yamaha actually produce 6 different PLG boards. It's here that Kenton come in and give the little tykes a home. Yep, up to four PLG boards can be housed and accessed in a Plugstation addressable over MIDI and the beauty of it is that the Plugstation can not only connect to an SW1000G (giving access to up to 5 synths for SW users) but it can also be used as a stand alone unit for use by anyone with a MIDI connection. Genius or what?
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