Price Paid: US $220.00 used
Ease of Use: 9
Most recent version of SW
Features: 8
Simple, not a lot of voice horsepower (8 at a time I believe) but boy this guy sounds warm and fuzzy!
The sequencer is too base for my taste. Hook it up to MIDI and your PC then dump a sequence in it. With a multitimbral sound disk, say for drums and percussion, it would make an EXCELLENT drum source in a MIDI setup. You can transfer sequences through MIDI.
Expressiveness/Sounds: 9
Get out what you put in, with a light coloring to the sounds(12bit warmth).
Great for Dance, Garage-House, Hip Hop, some techno. Mostly drums for those applications.
Great to sample static patches from modules, and layer them, then ram them through the filter for a unique voice/sound source.
Reliability: 8
Lots of use out of my keyboard and rack versions. Hit the road with both without a hitch, just take extra care with these guys, they are 13 or more years old for goodness sake.
Customer Support: 3
Forget it! Go to emuarc.com for good information on service, some parts and possible upgrades like SCSI for use with ZIP drives and internal drives.
Overall Rating: 9
If it were stolen, the perp better be careful in dark alleys. I would DEFINITELY replace! Hook it up to an old MAC SEHD ($25.00 eBay) and you have a DAW with computer editing and sample storage. Kinda like a mini-fairlight for a 100th the cost!
Once I learned this baby making beats and basic sound design and sampling were a treat and not a chore!
Makes me long for the days in the late eighties when if you had one you were the SH@#! Still quite useful and REAL!
Submitted by jRb at 08/21/2002 13:19
Price Paid: US $200,- used
Ease of Use: 8
The menu structure works very intuitive. It's not hard to find your way around, but the advanced features are a bit more complex.
Features: 8
Quite rich in features, has an arpeggiator, sequencer, scsi, diskdrive, harddisk.
Expressiveness/Sounds: 8
It's not a state of the art sampler, being 12 bit, but the expressive ness is great thanks to it's real analog 24 db filters and spectral synthesis.
Reliability: 9
Never had a problem with it.
Customer Support: N/A
Overall Rating: 9
For the price I paid, it was a bargain. Great sound, and it must be seen as a synthesizer more than a sampler. I'll probably replace it with a more modern sampler, but if I had the space (mine is the keyboards version, and I'd prefer the 19") I would keep it.
Submitted by Christian Tan at 03/06/2001 06:24
