Price Paid: EUR. (500,00) used
Ease of Use: 8
PCB rev. 1.01, EOS v.4.10. Fully expanded to 128MB RAM. Internal 540MB SCSI hard drive (from IBM). No additional interfaces.
Presets are quite a mixed bag: some are usable and some are filler. I appreciated that the presets are tweaked not to have great dynamics under the keyboard: it's very easy to use the machine live because of that (the mixing engineer doesn't go mad setting the mixer's line levels).
Editing patches is a breeze thanks to the big LCD display. Also, editing patches on E-mu machines had always been easy (i come from the PROteus/1 times and i had no difficulties at all even with a tiny 16x2 LCD :) ). E-mu engineers always had great sensibility regarding sound programming, with great care for the end user. Honestly, thanks to the big LCD displays, it's very easy to program samplers nowadays (the Akais were the ones starting the trend... Soon thereafter all the big names followed). No need for an external editor.
I needed to download the manual from E-mu's website (since i bought it used and the previous owner didn't have it).
Features: 9
Polyphony is 64 "audio channels". The unit comes with built in effects (same used in the PROteuses/Orbits/PlanetPhatts/Vintages etc...) which are not the best but usable overall. It does have expansion capabilities too! Polyphony can be doubled and it can accept a wide range of add-in cards (ADAT interfaces, a second set of MIDI connections, a very powerful and expensive efx card, a set of add-in ROMS with pre-programmed sounds, etc.). MIDI implementation is REALLY versatile: as a live user i LOVE the chance to change the presets while playing the keyboard WITHOUT cutting the tone generation: the chords and notes STILL play through patch changes :))) . Most modern and costly synths don't have this feature! Alas, you can program a very flexible matrix modulation for a ton of parameters: you definitely can tweak sounds to death and dramatically change them!
Expressiveness/Sounds: 9
As a sampler, the instrument quality varies... It depends mostly from the source material. The output level is quite weak (but most E-mu instruments have this "lack of power") even with the output levels set at their maximum. To compensate, this sampler is one of the cleanest machines i've ever used: if your mixes are noisy, don't blame on the sampler! The converters (Analog Devices for the output stage and Burr-Brown for the inputs) are so damn clean! The effects are not bad... Well... They don't shine too... At least the delays are not "glassy" and the reverbs don't cripple. As for the sound programming options, editing effects very easy. The playing reaction may really vary: it depends mostly on the way the material was sampled and programmed. I noticed that the most part of the presets have a very fast attack. Some of them (especially the pad sounds) need to be tweaked to taste. Tweaking sounds is very easy and you can program from pianissimo to fortissimo with ease.
Reliability: 9
I own it just from a month so i cannot say if the machine is reliable or not. When it arrived at home and booted, the instrument did nothing! Blank screen... No reaction to the buttons... Even powering off and on didn't work! I opened it and re-checked all the internal connectors... Just to discover that there were a loose daugther board that (because of the shipping) slipped off its cage. A slight re-thightening brought the machine back to life! :). For gigging i usually bring an external hard drive with me with all my samples (and also a little SC-55mkII from Roland... You never know what can happen :p ;) ).
Customer Support: 7
Had a couple of contacts with E-mu support in the past (before the Creative leveraging): they were helpful and VERY responsive! Nowadays i don't know... I am a little frightened thinking of what happened to a company that wrote the word SAMPLER and today.... Oblivion!!! :( Creative stopped the entire line of samplers... E-mu's machines are now simple ROM players )even if they are top-notch products). I can place a "7" for the supportin the past but... What now?!?
Overall Rating: 10
I would definitely buy another. I payed EUR. 500,00 for a machine with 128MB RAM and an external CD-ROM. I still think i did a bargain. I love the clean sound and the ease of use, honestly i don't like the noise the machine does when operational: even if it's a slight noise, i don't even accept it (especially from a machine that came for thousands bucks when bought brand new). The same problem afflicts my Akai S6000 (and also i even don't accept it!). I own an Akai S6000 and i compared my E4X to the Akai machine. Even if the Akai has a cleaner (and more powerful) sound (but the S6000 came 4 years later!), i really LOVE the warm sound of the E4X. It sounds so silky (while the Akai is more "clinic") and the filters are WAY better than the Akai ones. You can really pump dark, fatty, resonant sounds from the E4X. Even if i use it live, this machine is mostly (as every other sampler, i guess) a production machine: the one that has its own place in your studio and you can invoke when it's time to cut through the mix.
I would only LOVE if E-mu (Creative, can you hear me?!?!) would produce a modern PCI card for computers along with the features that made the Emulator series so famous in the world. I can't believe we lost such a great sampler producer!!! I placed a "10-out-of-10" because of the price paid.
Submitted by Davide Fuzzati at 12/04/2003 01:48
