Price Paid: 1600 (DM) used
Ease of Use: 10
I use OS Version 3.02. The Emu sound library is the greatest shit Iīve ever heard. These suckers are too dumb to give you sounds you can really use. The manual is o.k. Working with patches or sampling is very easy ! Even if you are pretty dumb you get used to it very easily.
Features: 7
Itīs a 64 voice sampler with an optional FX-board and 19 filter types, 16 MIDI-channels. The SCSI transfer option really kicks ass!!!
Once you use it you never wanna live without. The problem is that the Esi canīt handle the 64 voices if you play them at exactly the same time.
Expressiveness/Sounds: 8
The FX board is o.k. but you only have 2 effect engines. There are some delay, flanger, reverb, vibrato, chorus and distortion algorithms. The filters are awesome.
Reliability: 7
Be careful if you use the SCSI bus because if itīs used externally your Esi can crash when you load or safe something. The AKAI import sometimes crashes too.
But all in all I think it is the best sampler of its class!!!!
Customer Support: 4
The people at the hotline sometims donīt know what you are talking about if you have detailed questions to some error messages.
Overall Rating: 9
The Esi definitly the best sampler you can get for little money!
Submitted by Michael Wöstefeld at 01/17/2001 14:05
