Yamaha PSS-270
- Year Produced: 1986
- Synthesizer Chip: YM2413 (FM 2-operator)
- Polyphony: 9 Voices (or 6 voices with 5 drum sounds)
- Stereo: Yes (sort of)
- Number of Keys: 49 mini keys
- Line Out: Headphone Jack only (some units have Stereo RCA)
- MIDI: No
- Number of built-in instruments: 100
- Synthesizer Controls: None.
- Other controls: Sustain Button, Vibrato, Portamento, Stereo Symphonic
David’s Thoughts:
So I bought this little guy from ebay for $45. I got lucky and mine ended up having the RCA line outputs on the back. Some units don’t have it. And on ebay, they rarely show photos of the rear of keyboards from some reason. So I took a gamble and got lucky.
The keyboard is surprisingly small. It has the same number of keys and width as a PSS-470 and many of the other portasound keyboards. But it is not nearly as deep.
It doesn’t have a synthesizer control, but it does have a lot of built in sounds to play with. Some of the sounds are actually pretty neat. Granted, none of them sound super realistic, but if realistic is what you want, this is not the keyboard for you. It also has a button for sustain, portamento, and vibrato which will help make your sounds more customized.
The YM2413 synthesizer chip is not stereo, but they have added a “stereo symphonic” button, which defaults to on. It basically just wobbles the sound back and forth between the two speakers. If you are recording to a computer, and want mono sound, be sure to turn that button off. Otherwise your sounds will have a weird tremolo to it, almost like a Dalek.