Price Paid: N/A
Ease of Use: 10
ah! the Emax SE you use this nowadays as a cool retro sounding sampler-
or if your going after a NIN,front242,Depeche mode,skinny puppy or crusty trip hop or drum and bass type of sound -the filter is good for some acid madness-
-this thing has some bite! -but also some nice atmospherics! wow!-same as the emultaor II
best suited these days to a more radical type of musician rather than an uncreative wimp who wants to play "proper" nice consevative music -get outa here you little @#*&!% cheesball!!
Features: 10
Expressiveness/Sounds: 6
Reliability: 7
Customer Support: N/A
Overall Rating: 10
Submitted by Anonymous at 11/01/2003 07:23
Price Paid: US $3500!
Ease of Use: N/A
This is a sampler that debuted in the mid 80's for about $3500 as an "affordable" sampler compared to the high-end emulator II. It's a 12-bit sampler with 1 megabyte of non-expandable memory. I had also purchased the hard drive option: a 40mb drive for a cool $600 ;) It workes the same as the Emax II. Sampling is fairly easy, other than the fact that there is no thru for the audio signal. The manual is excellently written in a way that one can actually enjoy reading it.
Features: 7
Here's the deal: As a sampler, it's old. BUT as a synth, it is excellent.
The original emax (grey in color) uses analog filters to process the samples. This causes amazing hybrid sounds that could fool one into thing=king that they were made on an analog synth. Back when memory was expensive, samplers were used more as synthesizers. One would sample a short, 1 second long tone, loop it, and process it like he/she would on a regular synth. In a nutshell, my emax sticks around as a bass synthesizer. The Emax II contained digital filters. While they are good for spacey tones, they just didn't sound as fat as the analogs.
The emax is a multitamboural synth, that can handle up to 16 midi channels. It is velocity sensitive through midi, but not from it's local keyboard. The reason for this is that Emu had to keep costs as low as possible, and by doing that, a lot of corners were cut.
The sequencer is 16 tracks, but it isn't really made for regular sequencing. It's a good scratchpad sequencer, and it was mainly used for data dumping form a dedicated sequencer.
Expressiveness/Sounds: 7
its main feature these days is it's analog filters. other than that, it sounds like a 12-year old 12-bit sampler.
Reliability: 3
it's a little buggy-- i have used all OS's for it, but it apparently lays in the hardware. I used to gig with it a lot, but i would sweat buckets when i did. I had to time the use of it when i played live just in case i got an error while trying to load a bank. As far as the, construction, it's built pretty solid. It's pretty ugly, too.
Customer Support: 8
Emu is pretty good with tech support. I have called them a lot over the years, and I get the same people. I had one problem with the hard drive a long time ago, and one of the reps was mistaken about the warranty, and I had to haggle a bit to get things straightened out (he said 6 months, the manual said 1 year). But other than that, they are one of the better ones. I mean, you can still call and ask tech questions about the emax. that's pretty good right there.
Overall Rating: 6
It's an instrument that I will probably never get rid of. I have owned it since it was new, and I still use it, even with newer samplers. But i basically use it as a traditional synth, or as a backup if my other sampler has a full bank.
Submitted by Courtney Nielsen at 05/27/1998 14:20
