CASIO CT-X5000

The Casio CTX5000 offers well-crafted sounds in its price range and a powerful bass reflex sound system to bring out the full potential of these keys.

The keys offer a total of 800 different instrument sounds and 235 accompanying rhythms. The sound is processed using AiX Sound Source technology, which faithfully captures the qualities of the original instruments across the entire frequency spectrum and goes into such details as the slight change in piano tone when the keys are pressed. Moreover, thanks to the dynamic keyboard, these sounds can be used very expressively.

The sound system is taken care of by a system of two 15 W speakers with built-in bass reflex, which surprise with a rich sound with plenty of depth. This means that the keys don't need to be plugged into an external PA very often, and they'll do just fine on their own for smaller events.

Among the accompanying rhythms, you'll find just about every style, including modern dance music. Clear controls and dedicated buttons ensure that setting the desired sound and accompaniment is a matter of moments, which you'll appreciate especially when playing live.

There are 100 digital effects, including reverb, chorus and delay. Various effect parameters can be set in real time, for example in the middle of a song.

You can store your favourite sounds and their settings in 128 slots and easily recall them when needed. Entire phrases can also be stored on dedicated pads, which you can also use to play them back. For example, you can arrange multiple instruments together.

Producers and songwriters will appreciate the MIDI recorder with seventeen tracks and the ability to store up to 10 songs with 40,000 notes per song. Melodies can also be recorded in steps, so you can easily create an entire song one track at a time.

The keys also offer a 42-channel mixer, eight-part user-created backing rhythms, two pedal inputs, WAV playback from a USB flash drive, or a DATA manager for transferring files from the keys to your computer.