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What were the best samplers available 15 years ago? Hardware
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| MSZ |
| And why? Appreciate any oldschool help, maybe RANN would be the only one who knows anything? |
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| cryophonik |
| In the 90s, the Akai MPCs and E-mu Emulators were everywhere. I owned a few of the E-mus, but no Akais. I owned an E-mu e6400 and it was a beast back in the day. Not sure why anybody would want to own one now, though, unless you had a bunch of old sample discs that you wanted to convert, or maybe if you just wanted something to get you away from the computer. Feature- and performance-wise, this is one area where software wins hands-down IMO. |
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| DJ RANN |
Yeah, Dave's on the money with this one.
The E6400 was the top of the line at one point from EMU and they were going hard against Akai's reign so they had tone of RAM, 128 voices and great functionality. It could also be upgraded to accept and EMU preset boards, as well as Akai and Roland.
There were only two models higher than this which was the E4XT and E4 Platinum, which was basically an EMU IV (6400 but with 128 voices) with all the possible added extras, but at £5,000 it wasn't exactly cheap.
However, back in the day, Akai ruled the sampler market. The S series were the benchmark (until EMU started taking chunks out of them sales wise), then Akai responded with the Z range, which had both the Z4 and Z8 IIRC.
The Akai's were easier to use (EMU were a little weird in their menu programming and you had strange memory/saving hoops to jump though) but the filters were ing great on EMU and sounded a little plastic on the Akai (but some loved that - go figure).
The Akai's had less polyphony and voices at the time, with the S series, but they were the workhorses of many a studio. They had the detachable screen and you could connect a SCSI drive to give you 18gigs of samples.
Again, EMU came along and allowed IDE drives which gave you up to 80gig drives.
The Z4 and Z8 from Akai were really the last thing they did in that legacy and while they offered 24b/96k the writing was on the wall by then and by 2005 you couldn't really sell them except to die hard oldschoolers who could not abide computers.
Fun Akai Fact:
Armin made Blue Fear entirely on an Akai S2800. Nothing else. No EQ, no external FX. |
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| Looney4Clooney |
maybe off a year but
akai s5000
Yamaha A3000/ A4000 was released 99 i think
Emu e6400
most dance guys used the akai s3000 which came out a few years before and well, it would make sense that you start use the stuff you are familiar with. |
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| tehlord |
| quote: | Originally posted by cryophonik
I owned an E-mu e6400 and it was a beast back in the day. Not sure why anybody would want to own one now |
The filters still kick ass.
Another reason to use an old sampler is that the S6000 looks so cool, and is cheap.
But yeah, software wins here hands down on sooooo many levels.
Oh, but then something like the Roland W30 is going to add a character to anything you sample with it. |
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| tehlord |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
Fun Akai Fact:
Armin made Blue Fear entirely on an Akai S2800. Nothing else. No EQ, no external FX. |
Probably one of 2-3 tracks that got me properly into trance back in the day.
I find this incredibly difficult to believe despite the credibility of the source :p |
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| MSZ |
| Which were better for manipulation? |
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| alanzo |
| Are you planning on going back in time or something? Become Skrillex before he was Skrillex, maybe? |
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| DJ RANN |
| quote: | Originally posted by tehlord
Probably one of 2-3 tracks that got me properly into trance back in the day.
I find this incredibly difficult to believe despite the credibility of the source :p |
It may well be true but I have no way of verifying; it was made in 1996 and he made the claim in a couple interviews around or just after that time. Certainly the s2800 and s3000's were the mainstay of any producer - there were people who could make tracks start to finish in them so it's not impossible.
For manipulation, in terms of functions the EMU units had the edge, especially as you could pop all those boards in there, and the FX were really very good, but the Akai's user interface made it far more user friendly and intuitive so in some ways people got more out of them, and bare in mind this was a technology that was not that fluid in the first place (compared to linear editing on a computer for instance). |
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| cryophonik |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
For manipulation, in terms of functions the EMU units had the edge, especially as you could pop all those boards in there, and the FX were really very good, but the Akai's user interface made it far more user friendly and intuitive so in some ways people got more out of them, and bare in mind this was a technology that was not that fluid in the first place (compared to linear editing on a computer for instance). |
Not to mention that the Akais were much more hands-on as a performance tool. If I was in the market for a hardware sampler today, I'd definitely go with an Akai over an E-mu simply for its real-time performance capabilities. |
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