Angel City Turbo Mod

Very easy to install if you're not afraid to open up your equipment. The manual is very good, written by guys who know what you need to know.

The expansion board increases the memory eight times by giving you eight banks of 64 patches. That alone was worth the price of it. It also allows keyboard splits and layers and the ability to receive and trasmit splits on different midi channels.

This thing is definitely worth the money I paid for it, but I've heard it isn't available anymore. Angel City Audio was selling it and I don't know if they're still around or not. It doesn't add or subtract anything from the sound quality of a DW8000 so I can't give it a rating here.

I am having trouble with scrambled memory at times on my DW8000 which is why I can't play it live anymore. I don't know if this is a problem with the Turbo board or just a problem with an 18 year old keyboard. I suspect it may be the Turbo board though since the patches are stored there. I played live with it for about 10 years before I had any problem.

Never contacted Angel City about it, but they were very helpful when I talked to them about a couple of other things.

This thing is well worth the money if you have a working DW and love the instrument as most of us that have them do. Since mine isn't playable live anymore, I've been thinking of selling the Turbo board but have to do some testing first to see if it has a problem or not.

Easy to install...

Adds a lot to the basic functionality of the DW8000

I have to give it a 3 here...because there is a defect in this add-on board. I added it to two of my DW8000's and it causes a glitch to be heard on some patches...a recurring "zzzt" sound that is cycling. I was able to eliminate the sound by reduceing the VCA for these patches...but it was a pain to go through all of the patches on both machines to fix this. Other than that, the additional waveform allows some neat sounds to be created.

Appears to be fine over the long term.

Out of business...don't expect any.

I sold both my Turbo DW8000's, and kept the EX8000, which you can't install the Turbo board in. I don't miss the clacky keys, or the waveform/VCA glitches of the turbo board in the least.

This is not as much a review of the Korg DW-8000 as it is of the Angel City "Turbo DW" modification board.
I'm not sure if this board is still available any more, but in case someone out there runs across a DW-8000 with this mod, I thought I would contribute my .02.
The Angel City Turbo DW is a circuit board that installs inside the DW-8000 and adds extra patch memory (8 banks of 8 programs), and a lot of extra functions that were not available with the stock keyboard.
It's a user installable board, but if you're not good with electronics or tools, or afraid of cracking open your keyboard, you might want to have a tech install it.
One nice thing about the mod is that it comes with a new lithium battery on the board, which backs up the patch memory. Since these things are only good for 7 - 10 years, the mod replaces the battery in an elderly (as in all DW-8000's!) unit.
I'm not sure of the software rev, or the firmware rev, I bought the mod in 1992, after it had been out about 18 months.
At the time I bought the board, they were running a special on the board and a patch tape of multiple banks. If the board is still available, I imagine they include the patches with it now. I believe there were about 10 or 12 banks of sounds, more than the 8 the board holds.
You have to load them using a cassette tape interface (remember those!) I had no problems doing this. One important thing to remember is that if you are going the other way (DW to Tape), YOU HAVE TO USE THE MIC input. Otherwise there is not enough level from the DW cassette interface to print on the tape. Going from the tape to the DW, just use the line out.
Also, the cassette interface uses A MONO mini jack. These are available at Radio shack, what you need is a RCA to 1/8" MONO mini jack cable.
Many of the sounds are "best of" compilations from DW-8000 user groups. Some of them are Angel City sounds (Angel City is a 3rd party sound developer).
The patches range from really bad to really good. There are a couple of banks of "dreamy" patches that are good for pads and swirly effects. The electric pianos are pretty good as well.
To me the real point of buying the board is not the sounds, but the extra features. If you have access to a lot of patches, you can at least store them on board, although the access to them is a little convoluted (see below).
Other than some additional parameters, the patch editing is real simple, just like a stock DW-8000. I come back to my DW-8000 a lot, just because it is easy to program. You can't get a wide variety of sounds, or real glassy ones, but for warm and fat it's great.
A patch editor is great for using with the board, because you have to load a bank in the main memory, and then copy it to the other 8 banks to store more than 64 sounds. I use midi-quest, and I assembled the banks and then loaded them into the DW one bank at a time and then copied them to the 8 banks on the Turbo DW board.
I don't know of any patch editors that support the Turbo DW mod directly.
The manual is very good, and goes into a lot of detail on sound creation with the DW. It's a little sketchy in some places, but overall it not only helps with the Turbo board, but it helps to understand the keyboard itself better.

The DW turbo mod does not add polyphony, you still have the stock 8 voices of sound. You can do Bi-timbral splits and layers with it though, something the stock DW-8000 cannot do. If you use this feature (splits or layers) you only get four voices per patch.
The keyboard action is of course, unchanged. I'm not sure if the Turbo mod will fit in the EX-8000 module, there might not be enough room for it.
The Turbo mod does not add any effects (the DW-8000 only has a digital delay for effects) but does add a sample and hold waveform to the LFO. This is great as it gives you a more random LFO that can be used to modulate the filter or amplitude, giving a lot more life to a patch.
Unless you use a real long LFO time, the stock LFO waves get boring real quick. With the random LFO waveform, you can get a quick modulation that doesn't repeat as often.
The Turbo DW is an expansion board - The way that it works is that you have the original stock memory of 64 patches. Then you have another 8 banks of 64 patches "in the background". There is a command to "load a bank", which then copies the selected bank (1 or 2, or 3, etc.) into the "live patch memory". Then you have another whole 64 sounds to use.
This process happens very quickly (about 2 seconds), so you could use it live (maybe not during a song). It takes a couple of keystrokes, and then to hear the new sounds, you actually have to call up a patch, since the original patch from the previous bank is still in the memory buffer.
Once you get it down, it's a pretty easy process though, not much harder than calling up patches on any other synth.
The downside is that you can't call these other banks up from midi. They don't respond to bank select or anything. This is not really a fault of the board, more a design limitation of the original unit.
MIDI - A REAL PLUS with the Turbo DW board is a LOCAL OFF feature, something the original did not have. This is invaluable for working with a sequencer. You have several varieties of local off, depending on whether or not you are doing splits and layers.
Another nice feature is half step tuning. The original DW-8000 could only be tuned in octaves. When I got mine, I was playing in a band that tuned down a half step, so I had to loop a rubber band around the pitch bend knob, and set the bend to a semitone. This limited me to only bending up, and was a real drag.
The Turbo DW lets you tune in half steps, but with one limitation. You can only tune UP, NOT DOWN. If you want to tune a half step down, you have to go up 11 semitones because you can't go down one.
Although this means you have to play everything an octave lower, or reprogram your patches to use the lowest octave oscillator, it beats the HELL OUT OF A RUBBER BAND!
I don't detune anymore (back then our singer was trying to be Geoff Tate of Queensryche and needed to hit the high notes), but this feature is nice to have.
As I mentioned you can do splits and layers with the DW, but only two (with 8 voice polyphony that's about as many as you would want to do). You can set it up so the splits/layers are on two different midi channels which is nice if you want to play one sound, and have midi from a sequencer or another keyboard play a second sound.
The bi-timbral feature is a little limited though, as you have a level parameter for the second sound, and it's hard to make it heard over the primary sound, unless you turn the oscillator level of the primary sound way down. The main use of the Bitimbral mode would be to fatten up a single note line by stacking two sounds, thereby getting 4 oscillators per key.
Other than the features I've outlined, the Turbo DW board does not change the Midi features of the DW.
No on board sequencer of course.
There is an arpeggiator (with the stock DW), but compared to the new ones, it's rather basic. It's supposed to sync to midi, but I've found this to be rather flakey.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

The Turbo DW board does not (except for the LFO) really change the sound of the stock keyboard, so the same strenths/weaknesses of a DW would apply.
Not great for realistic sounds, but what are good are:
Strings (synthy type, not real), organs (although the stock ones can suck), electric piano, brass punches (synth style), "old school" lead sounds, and basses.
I mainly use the DW-8000 for low end sounds.
The DW-8000 does not do the late 80's tinkly breathy sounds very good at all. It's not very bright and most sounds have a very muffly quality to them. This can be good though because the sounds can sit better in a mix, and be turned up loud without getting annoying.
It's a good 2nd or 3rd keyboard for rock or blues type stuff. I guess you could use it for dance, but the filters are not as agressive as a lot of newer keyboards.
Velocity and aftertouch response are pretty good, but the keyboard is pretty clacky.
The effects are real minimal, really just a delay.

The DW-8000 has never failed on me or been in the shop in 11 years.
Sometimes it wigs out or locks up, but mainly when hooked to a sequencer. I have discovered that if you send a thick data stream through it (say controller messages meant for another synth or FX unit) that it sometimes chokes. If you have a multiport patchbay or midi interface, I would put it on it's own port.
The Turbo Mod has been great, NO problems whatsover. I guess the best endorsement of this product is that it has not affected the playability midi reception, or reliability of the DW-8000 AT ALL. It really does become a part of the machine. After you install it, you don't really notice it's there.

I only talked to Angel City before I bought the unit. They were really friendly and said to give them a call if I had an install problem.
Base on the literature I was sent, I would say this product was more a labor of love rather than a for profit motive. They really seemed to be into the DW-8000. When I called they said they would be making one up for me, so it sounds like they make them on demand.
I don't know how their support of it is now, but I've never really needed it.

My DW-8000 was my first synth, so I'm kind of attached to it. The Turbo DW mod was great because it fixed some things (local off) that really made the keyboard much nicer to work with.
I don't really plan on ever selling it, especially since I have about $1200 in it with the Turbo Mod. I probably would replace it, but only if I could get another Turbo DW board!
I don't know what the current price of the Turbo DW is, but you could probably get it and a good used DW-8000 together for around $400 - $500, which is more than it's really worth, but then again it's a nice combo.
I can't imagine anyone coming up with a similar product these days, since keyboards are obsolete so fast and the firmware/software has become a lot more complicated and proprietary.
I guess the closest comparison would be the roland SR-JV series boards, which only have samples and patches. To bad Roland doesn't include software fixes on the boards as well!
If you come across a DW-8000 with the Turbo mod installed, I would heartily recommend that you buy it. Anyone who went to the trouble and expense of adding it was a DW afficiando, and probably took real good care of the unit.
I'm giving it an overall 10 for nostalgia sake...