Price Paid: UKP 360
Ease of Use: 5
Features: 5
This is a board which retrofits the ESI to increase functionality.
Expressiveness/Sounds: 5
IMHO:
The Reverbs are not good, I found them thin and grainy, e.g.. microverb 1 sounds fuller/smoother. The effects only have a couple of parameters each, The delays are useable though, as are the modulation types.
(I wish they'd put a convincing Leslie/drive effect here to help get those elusive Hammond sounds which many people try in vain to get using sampled driven hammonds.
The filters are much more powerful than the original but are not very warm at all.Self oscillation is cold and increasing amounts tend to bleed too much warmth and 'power' from the underlying sound compared even to some other low cost digital filter implementations. The resonance is not as useable as many budget synths : e.g.. Yamaha TG series. These filters are *not* for re-creating lush synth type sounds, though they can be useable in their own right for 'damping' and digital 'off the wall' effects. Overall: Leaning towards sterile.
Two of the '6' new outs are actually a duplication of the main outs summed with the effect output. IE effects do *not* appear at any other outputs. So, you actually get 2 extra stereo output 'subs'. You can't send different sounds to the main and the fx outs. So it's one or the other. Also the subs are used like 'auxiliaries' when using effects. So combining the use of subs as outputs, and sending selected sounds to effects is a compromise in practice. Total useable outs: 3 stereo, 6 mono (panned).
A BIG shame is; It's not possible to 'resample' effected sounds, so if you want to make a 'hardcopy sample' of that stereo gated room snare or distorted Kick, you'll have to output to an external device and sample again. You can't add the effects to the sample input stage either. In all it's better to use higher spec. outboard on the way in.
The new O/S.
To export to an E4/64xx for studio work, one has to save the bank down as a v2.04 bank and so lose all new filter/effect settings.
Monitor through while sampling on my machine intermittently stops. I have to save, turn off, unplug all outputs and turn on again to get it back.
It's still not possible to save just samples or presets. So to add a new sound to an old bank (say, and archive of basses) you'll have to save your new bank, load the old bank, and import the sound, save, then return to the new bank. The ability to save just a 'multi' setup 'file' with just it's own sounds would save having to manually delete irrelevant samples, and could have saved huge amounts of storage space.
The OS trashed 2 of my library banks, which had never happened before with the earlier OS. It seems not to notice when a disk is nearly full, like the previous OS. And can trash sample headers.
The screen still 'fouls up' now and then with spurious characters here and there. In the digital edit section start point entries still can become offset whilst typing. you need to exit the page and go back in to clear the bug.
I had problems sample dumping to an E4 too. (I haven't tried a SCSI dump yet) Still can't import anything other than Akai s1000, and some older emu formats. Not good in the light of modern trends (a3000).
Better at recognizing SCSI devices. Zip/Jaz drive compatibility is much better (seems to quickly 'auto-mount' new disks) Digital I/O implementation is very useful; There is an output boost for digital use. Although, strangely, single sounds are not output at an absolute maximum (the equivalent of their normalised values). Sounds often need normalising on the target machine, bringing up the noise floor. Time compression is now accurate to 1/10th of a percent, and stereo phase lock is better. Pitch bend device input 'scrubbing' in the loop page now works (good for getting to an edit point quickly)
For my personal use, the ESI is a preproduction sampling and auditioning tool. It's actual sampling facility is well up to the job. (ie The final sounds to end up on 'tape' will come from a fully specced sampler.) ESI TOK has gone some way to improving the machine in this field, but it rema
Submitted by Grant at 09/25/1997 06:40
