BEST SAMPLER and WHY??

[Doc Mixwell]

The ASR has a sound that people think is "crunchy" and sort of "dirty"

Thats the only machine in your list I have used,

peace

[nick x0x]

the emu all day....its the deepest one of the bunch....sick filters, sick processing algos(pitch and time compression especially), sick modulation matrix.

the emu is more of a digital modular synth then a sampler....it just happens to play back samples really really well.

[H-Rezz]

Originally Posted by roginator

if you have to take one out of this few...wich would you take and why????

Roland S 760
Ensoniq ASR 10
Emu Systems E4xt

for electronic music

Roland S760, nice and clean, good for orchestral stuff .....
Ensoniq ASR10, dirty and bitty , nice for lo fi stuff...
Emu E4, Fat and analogue'y , with nice clarity but not sterile , good at the bitty thing as well ...

They all have different colours , depends what sort of electronic music you are doing , dirty and nasty or clean and pristine ..

[rawdigits]

I can't judge but I have an E4XT Ultra coming tomorrow!


Tell me how good it sounds!



Ahh...

[rokuez]

Emu Emulator III Emulator III - Overview

16 voices , outputs for each, stereo outs, and each voice has its own respective analog filter.

[alexstringer]

I don't like the sound of Roland samplers.
The Asr10 is noisy and a pain in the neck to use.
Emu samplers are best to me: logical , ergonomic, clean and punchy sounding (especially the Ultra serie).

[roginator]

OK TRUTH

I got

ASR 10
EMU EII
EMU EIII
EMU E4xt
ADD one with sampling
PPG with therm B

So Im thinking of selling one!!!!!!

ASR 10R is candidate!!!!!

[rawdigits]

Hi

Just wanted to say my E4XT Ultra arrived a few days ago..

I have it now hooked up to my logic and loaded my samples on it. Great sound although I am just listening through my HD25s ..I am waiting for my cables

Hooking up to logic was a breeze, thought I might have some problems but no..thumbsup


Making a readables CD-Rom is kina PITA but I have sorted it out now.

For future use I will do SMDI Sample Transfer with DSP Quattro and Recycle 2.0.


anyone got a recycle 2.0 to give away?



Can't wait to run them DACs hot...mwuhahah




Greets




Christian

[C Heat]

I got an S-760 with the digital I/O and display option.

Mint.

If anyone's interested...

[nick x0x]

Originally Posted by DivineChemical

I like E-Mu's da converters better than other samplers. They have a certain 'warmth' to them. The only thing that bites is that the analog inputs are noisy as hell so a digital i/o board is mandatory. Other than that... I love it. *runs off to hump my ESI-4000*

maybe the ESI's analogs are noisy...but the classics and ultras are dead silent...they have balanced inputs.

[Beastie]

all good samplers of an era and with their own sound vibes....

personally the emu sounds best to me - however the os is a mind bender

so i say

KONTAKT all the way - where emu should have been now!

peace

[dlmorley]

Originally Posted by roginator

if you have to take one out of this few...wich would you take and why????

Roland S 760
Ensoniq ASR 10
Emu Systems E4xt

for electronic music

S-750 roland sonically wipes them all IMHO but from that list I#d say they are all ok.

[dlmorley]

Originally Posted by rokuez

Emu Emulator III Emulator III - Overview

16 voices , outputs for each, stereo outs, and each voice has its own respective analog filter.

Well yes. This is a beast.
Top samplers for me
Emulator III, Fairlight series III and IIx, Roland S-750. Had all of them and the Roland keeps up nicely. stunning low end. The Series III has a range that is phenomenal, the IIx sounds Cool as hell and the EIII is the last of the GREAT EMU samplers. Great operating system too (at least I liked it!)

[Halfmoon]

My S5000 works fine for me but I wish it had the EMU's filters.

Rich

[MonoBrow]

Dont sell your samplers..or even 1 they arent worth much money anyways..not many people really know what it is worth to have hardware sampling these days!!! Dont do it..you will regrett it..especially on the asr 10. tutt

[Chrisac]

Roland S770/50/60
The sound/filters/display/features, and just the fact that Roland produced this ten years before any software company did.

MPC 60/3000/2000/4000
For programming beats, nothing can beat it.

Put an S range sampler together with an MPC and you have an amazingly creative hands on musician friendly system. Those two do easily what ableton live so desperately hard tries to do. Its also the true samplists gates to freedom.

I never had a Fairlight or Emulator but I did have an Ultra 64 which I just couldnt be bothered with. It felt like ten steps back compared to the Roland S range but im sure it was very good.

[Chrisac]

Originally Posted by roginator

if you have to take one out of this few...wich would you take and why????

Roland S 760
Ensoniq ASR 10
Emu Systems E4xt

for electronic music

Just to mention if your thinking about buying an S760 do remember it has one feature missing the 770 and S750 has. Its internal sampling/itself. I dont know if this is a feature thats useful for you.

And again I would have the S750 to add to my existing two

[dan p]

AY! i have a roland 750 &760 sitting in my rack and they have gotten lots of use for well over ten years.I have heard the others and to my ears i like the way the rolands outputs are colored.Just personal taste i guess.
You can find these units cheap as well.

[sound_forward]

I had E4 and S760 and I still have ASR10.

S760 has very powerful digital filters and sounds big and somewhat dirty. It sits nice in the mix but it has somewhat slow workflow. I sold it because I prefer my emax for dirty/fat sounds and ASR10 for cleaner sounds so there was no need for roland.

E4 has "artificial" analog sound that I just did not like at all. It is very hard to make sounds that sit well in the mix. Emu got its reputation with E2 and E3 series (analog filters) not with E4, which are in my opinion, far behind in sound. Both E2 (and EMAX1) and E3 are fantastic. E2/EMAX are very dirty and fat, E3 is cleaner and smoother, more hi-fi (but not very reliable).

ASR-10 is just great. It is not "that" dirty (unless in 30kHz mode), it has a special sound that is hard to describe. It does not change original sound that much, it just makes it a little bit more punchy and it fits great in the mix. It has also very fast and friendly interface.

ASR-10 is my choice!

[freshmints]

kontakt and battery .
hardware is killing my workflow

[Killah_Trakz]

Originally Posted by freshmints

kontakt and battery .
hardware is killing my workflow

yep honestly thats all i use now.

[Beermaster]

For sound quality and the nicest filters it has to be the S760 - I have four of these as well as Emus and Akai - Althought the memory size is limited to 32 meg the basic sound is far superior and altho the filters don't offer as many types as EOS does the quality and balls of the S series are far superior.

Eric Persing of spectrasonics chose to stay with S series samplers even tho EMu and Akais offered more memory and 'features' becuase of the sound - much of the early spectrasonics libraries were made with S760/750s.


The disk and file storage system on the S-series is very inteligent and saves one hell of a lot of disk space by checking if file sets in memory already exist in the same state on the drive so as to avoid doubling up on saving multiple copies of the same sounds for each project. - Unlike the Emu system where each bank has to be completly stored a new each time.. ARgghhh !

The S760 preset set up page lets you have as many presets on one midi channel as you like . The Emu EOS only lets you have one preset on one midi channel - so only 16 presets at one time.( Annoying if you have say a collection of different drum presets that you want to mix and match on one channel )

The option to use an old RGB TV or monitor and mouse to draw filter envelopes or loops points is a bonus too.

Beer

[dlmorley]

Originally Posted by Beermaster

For sound quality and the nicest filters it has to be the S760 - I have four of these as well as Emus and Akai - Althought the memory size is limited to 32 meg the basic sound is far superior and altho the filters don't offer as many types as EOS does the quality and balls of the S series are far superior.

snip

The option to use an old RGB TV or monitor and mouse to draw filter envelopes or loops points is a bonus too.

Beer

I'd agree. The mouse function on the 750 (I guess on the 760 too) for wave drawing is also a great function and has saved many a scratched vinyl sample when I do stuff with DJ's or "found" sounds...
Fabulous Midi timing too.
Enough, I don't want the prices to go up...

[jude]

Originally Posted by freshmints

kontakt and battery .
hardware is killing my workflow

wow, its doing totally the opposite for me!!!

[Stevil]

emu & roland are more clean.
ensoniq more gritty.

take a look @ Kurzweil while yer @ it.

[Chrisac]

Originally Posted by DivineChemical

I love how all the suckers in the music industry have switched over to soft-samplers. It makes all of our hardware toys depreciate in value and easier to get our grubby hands on!

Agreed and to this day there isnt one soft sampler that actually feels like a sampler. The NI Kontakt, Mach5, Digis one, Es24, Halion are all ultra bloated and yet none of them offer what a samplist needs. Incredibly as far as I know you cannot sample in to a soft synth and that part of the process is the very process that can give you a creative spur because your using your ears not your eyes. To think the S range is about twenty years old and they were produced with this as standard. And the mice that comes with them are all still working. So how come my Roland mouse lasts for twenty + years but my Logitech PC ones last aboyt a year

[lord toranaga]

tx16w

[Gryten]

Originally Posted by Chrisac

Agreed and to this day there isnt one soft sampler that actually feels like a sampler. The NI Kontakt, Mach5, Digis one, Es24, Halion are all ultra bloated and yet none of them offer what a samplist needs. Incredibly as far as I know you cannot sample in to a soft synth and that part of the process is the very process that can give you a creative spur because your using your ears not your eyes. To think the S range is about twenty years old and they were produced with this as standard. And the mice that comes with them are all still working. So how come my Roland mouse lasts for twenty + years but my Logitech PC ones last aboyt a year

DirectWave by Image-Line samples, so does the EmulatorX2.

[Siem]

I used to work with an Akai s3000xl, I liked the time-stretching function especially on vocals when you put the quality on low and the duration on 200-300%. After getting a coffee and a sandwich you'd have - t.h..a..aa...e..t - ultimate dirty drum 'n bass vocal sample. I've been thinking about getting an s3000xl (or one of the more recent models, if they have this feature) again especially for this, you don't hear this effect in modern dance tracks anymore. A big loss, if you'd ask me. I didn't like the interface on the Akai, it took a long time before I got my mind around it.
Nowadays I sometimes use an Emu SP1200 to get some dirty padsounds and sometimes for drumsounds, I'm not completely convinced about this sampler/drumcomputer yet. The filters can be nice, but they can't be modified unless you're willing to screw the SP1200 open and 'feel lucky' on the variable resistors with an oversized screwdriver. The 12bit grittyness is something I like very much and sampled drums can be used, in conjunction with the filters, to shadow the same drums in high quality adding a phat layer. I could also use a great outboard EQ and a compressor and make even phatter drums, but there is centainly something special about its vile sound.
There's another EMU (E4000?) sampler in our studio with a broken display - I'm not sure if I could remote control it with my Mac pro and a USB->SCSI converter. I would love to use it and experience the filters and probably the same userfriendlyness as I have enjoyed on the SP1200.

My favourite sampler at this moment is my (t)rusty old Sequential Circuits Prophet-3000. Its converters make the sound very warm and the analog filters are inspiring. I love the extensive modulation options, it's very synthlike (I imagine the EMU sampler must be like this too, plus it has more filter types?). The filters sound great but they're not the best to create very interesting evil bass sounds with, they're more of the friendly kind and I find those very suitable for creating dreamy synth-ish sounds based on samples of real instruments. From oboe to electric guitars, it has a bit of the Sasha/Junkie XL flavour (but better/completely different) altough I believe they do most it with the Massivo - which I also use. The interface, which is a seperate desktop/lap controller connected by a phonecord, is semi intuitive and quite fast to work with, naming samples, programs is a bit tedious though - it does have graphics and not only text as some other samplers, I had a blue backlight modded into it. I love its vintage value, this was the first 16bit sampler and it was quite revolutionary and groundbreaking on the previous mentionted grounds, but due to the soon following demise of Sequential Circuits less than 150 were produced and the first half are plagued by bugs, luckely mine belongs to the second half. The downside of my sampler is it only has 4mb of ram and it doesn't accept anything more hightech than Syquest drives as a recording medium (I tried everything to get SCSI memorycard readers work). 4mb is however more than enough for my uses since I record everything back into my sequencer.

Software samplers are complete pants in my eyes. The primary reason being: none of these SAMPLE!! You'd expect an effect plugin you can use as an insert, complementing a software sampler so it can record, but no!! I did consider Halion at one time, because it accepted dragging a dropping from audio tracks.
However I must mention a very handy software tool I've been using intensively it's called 'audio hijack pro' for the Mac, on the PC there's a program called 'virtual audio cable'. I sample a lot of sound, mostly from downloaded movies and especially crappy vintage series, with this on my laptop but also from some strange audiogenerating programs. This is a great leap in technology in this area, it beats having to record everything on VHS or DAT you watch in order hoping to catch a couple of samples and kicking yourself in your head when you missed a great sample and didn't have tape running. I don't watch tv anymore btw.

I don't use many plugins but I do use Kontakt 2 to play some converted Akai sample-cd's with vintage synth sounds and some ethno libraries (these are really underappreciated and cheap now). The 'futuristic' interface hides a lot, most importantly common sense. Most folders in the browser are having their names cut off due to the limited width of the file section I can't see what I'm doing and where I am in my sample structure, while the 30" cinema screen is begging for more. Everything else is hidden underneath tabs and unclear menus my Roland Dj-70 mk1 was more transparant sometimes. The only nice thing is a feature that can be used to timestretch (vocals) in realtime and sounds pretty neat (but ends up in killing the buggy plugin sometimes).
Battery 3 is also used by me: it's very handy to work out ideas quickly and can test a lot of samples and I hear which one fits best to give me an idea what kind of sound will fit at that spot (later on I can recreate simular sounds with my gear, or just tweak it with hardware EQ and compression) - it's hard and tedious to do that with the hardware samplers I worked with and with battery I just click on next (same with Kontakt btw). Also there's a great option in Battery 3 to change the pitch of a sample without changing the duration and freaking around with the quality, thus creating completely new sounds. A big **** you is you can't automise it and Battery 3 will black-out sometimes when I play with this feature.