E-mu Sounds of the ZR ROM

Price Paid: US $129.00

Ease of Use: 10
Pop it in and you're good to go. If you've never installed a board like this before, it may take you a few minutes to figure out how to put it in. Once you've done it or any similar installation, it's a piece of cake. Once the board is installed, the sounds are presets that load instantly.

Features: N/A
The only features are the sounds, really. See below.

Expressiveness/Sounds: 5
I was pretty disappointed. I put the board in a Vintage Pro, so I can compare these sounds to those, and to those in my other synths. They don't really stand up all that well.

First, the acoustic pianos. The "Perfect Piano" presets are pretty good for a synthesizer, but not quite as good as the amount of memory they take up led me to expect. They really suffer when A/Bed with my Roland RD700 piano, although that may not be a fair comparison. Strangely, in some songs that I play the octave above middle C sounds dull. Playing if from a semi-weighted synth or a fully weighted digital piano, it's like you can't play that octave hard enough for the notes to get really bright. On the brighter variations, the octave below middle C actually sounds brighter than the one above middle C, regardless of playing style. An illusion, maybe, but it just doesn't sound right. There seem to be no velocity layers, so soft notes sound strident but quiet. The multisampling is good, and there are a number of useful variations. For live playing with a band it would probably be fine, and would probably be better than a Korg Triton. I think the piano that comes with the Roland Vintage SRX card is better, though, and the Fantom X's piano is better. Triton pianos are not as good, and I'm not familiar enough with Motif pianos to compare. Any Kurzweil instrument would have much better pianos, as would any dedicated digital piano, of course.

Other emulative sounds are a mixed bag, mostly so-so. Wurlies sound nothing like the real thing at all; the harp sounds different than most, but pretty and interesting; upright bass sustain is too long; electric basses are thin, but fretless is very good; pizz strings suck; muted trumpet is great as long as you don't go below middle C, etc. Many sounds have some weird and fatal flaw in them that makes them pretty unusable: the harpsichord has a pitch envelope-sounding blip on the attack that makes it sound very synthetic, and the organs have a weird, slow LFO on them that makes you kind of seasick and that you can't disable. (Is this supposed to be a slow Leslie?) If you're looking for acoustic emulations, you need to go elsewhere. The drums are pretty good, though.

Synthetic sounds are better, but again, there are more interesting options out there. E-mu's z-plane filters really spice up these sounds a lot, and there are a couple of recreations of Ensoniq's transwaves that are mildly interesting. If you program, you can make some good sounds with this material. This board would add to a Virtuoso or Planet Earth module, but the Protei, Vintage Pro, or any of the dance modules already have more interesting synth sounds in them.

Reliability: N/A
Seems fine.

Customer Support: 1
Forget it. Ensoniq was bought by E-mu, which was bought be Creative (the maker of Nomad mp3 players). First they dropped all Ensoniq instruments, then all the pro E-mu instruments, now they've even dropped the groove boxes and are focusing solely on their software sampler. E-mu used to make fantastic instruments and used to employ people who knew and cared a lot about them. Those days are gone. Welcome to the era of corporate consolidation and profit optimization.

Overall Rating: 6
The only reason I have this is for live use of one piano preset. Kind of a waste of a rom slot, but it was cheaper than a Kurzweil module. I wouldn't use the piano in any other situation. My other gear covers every base better than this sound rom does. My Roland RD700 is a much better piano, of course; my E-mu E-synth and Vintage Pro are better at acoustic emulations; my Novation Supernova II covers smooth and fat while my Waldorf Microwave XT covers digital grunge and evolving soundscapes. The ZR rom doesn't stand a chance against these synths. If I come across a cheap CD-ROM with a good piano on it, I'll probably sell the ZR rom and replace it with something more interesting.

Submitted by Robert Haines at 09/12/2004 21:55

Price Paid: US $70

Ease of Use: 10
Pop the SIMM in the slot - no big deal here.

Features: N/A
No real features - it's a SIMM

Expressiveness/Sounds: 7
I was a little disappointed in this SIMM. I read the reviews before I bought it and though that the piano patches would be better. I would say that the piano patches are better than those on the Proteus Rom in the high end, but muddy & worse on the low end. I have successfully created a series of about a 6 or 7 piano patches that sound much better than the ones on this ROM by using the Proteus Rom. It took quite a bit of work as E-mu pianos tend to be really good over a few octaves, then sound totally dead in other octaves. Don't get me wrong, the pianos sound alright, they just aren't one of EMU's strong points.

On the other hand, organs definately are. Almost all the organ patches are fantastic - a 10+. Most synths have trouble with organs, especially church organs, but not E-Mu. I feel like I'm playing in a huge cathedral on a million dollar organ with this ROM (which is why I'm keeping it).

The synth/lead sounds are pretty good, maybe an 8.5

THe few pads are really good 9.0

The strings are good, 8.0

The drums are dead sounding 5.0

The guitars are bad (I play guitar & most synths totally suck at this) 5.0

THe GM sounds are junk (but then most are anyway) 4.0

The basses are fair to really good 8.0

Reliability: N/A

Customer Support: N/A
Probably won't get far here - these babies are on close-out.

Overall Rating: 7
I don't know if I would replace this SIMM. I hear that the Vintage Keys SIMM is pretty good as is the Techno Synth Construction Yard, although those are pretty pricy. Contact me if you are interested in any of my piano patches which are much better than anything I've heard from E-mu before.

Submitted by Steve Wright at 09/03/2004 09:59

Price Paid: US $120.00 used

Ease of Use: 10
Easy to install, just pop in the SIMM and go.

Features: 7
Its a SIMM memory chip with a bunch of samples and five banks of presets from the discontinued Ensoniq ZR-76 and Halo keyboards. Includes William Coakley's "Perfect Piano" samples. Bank 1 is a GM (General MIDI) bank. Bank 3 is all drums and percussion.

Expressiveness/Sounds: 7
I picked up this ROM to add to my Vintage Pro, mainly for the acoustic piano samples. I'm a guitarist mainly, not a trained keyboardist, but I think the Perfect Piano sounds great. I've read some negative reviews of it, and I'm sure there are better sounding piano samples out there, but for the price you really can't beat this. I think they kind of shoot themselves in the foot by calling it "Perfect Piano", c'mon, nothing's perfect! Anyway, I find it quite expressive for my purposes and there are lots of variations. Adds a real acoustic piano sound to the already impressive array of sounds in my Vintage Pro.

Now to the rest of the sounds on this board. Well, they range from very good to very bad!
The GM bank is pitiful. I had a Waveblaster daughterboard on my old PC's Soundblaster soundcard that sounded better! A few of the GM patches are OK, but I doubt I will ever touch that bank at all. It's there if you need a GM bank, but if you play a MIDI file with it, it wont be sounding too hot.

The rest:
Synths, arps, fx - very good. The bank that was "updated" (I think it's Bank 2) to take advantage of the P2K's filters and fx is very good in general. EPs, organs, and string ensembles - good (church organs are great). Basses and brass - OK to weak. Drums - fair, pretty dated and dead sounding. Nowhere near the quality of drum samples on EMU stuff like World or Phatt ROMs.

Reliability: 10
SIMMs are pretty reliable, they dont fail often.

Customer Support: 5
Never dealt with them.

Overall Rating: 6
Bought this used to add a good acoustic piano sound to my Vintage Pro, and for that purpose, I'd give it a 10. For overall sounds, it would be much lower, maybe a 6. This ROM will give you a very nice acoustic piano sound, and some good synth and organ sounds, but that's about it. For a little over a hundred bucks, though, I'm not complaining. At least it has five banks, not four like most EMU ROMS, that kind of makes up for the worthless GM bank.

Submitted by Anonymous at 06/21/2004 08:08

Price Paid: US $279

Ease of Use: 10
Just pop it in and away you go...actually, E-mu makes synths that are fine for tweaking, and it's easy to adjust the Coakley piano to have a "soft touch" if you like, by working with the amp, filter and key Velocity settings. You also get many variations of the piano right off the bat, pick your favorite one and work with it a little.

Features: 10
It's a ROM--it's features are in proportion to how willing you are to program with it.

Expressiveness/Sounds: 8
Piano is excellent (from a Steinway D). Organs are good, especially the acoustic ones. Drum bank has dated sound but samples are excellent--can be touched up with Exciter, Bass Enhancer or other plug in (not just EQ). Acoustic sounds mostly suck. GM bank is weak, but it's there, the only one you get with E-mu ROMs. Original Ensoniq synth sounds are quite good. Verdict: I bought this for the piano, so I'm happy. I get 128-voice polyphony since it's inside my command station.

Reliability: 10
Well, it's a ROM...

Customer Support: 10
It's always a pleasure dealing with E-mu, best support I know.

Overall Rating: 9
I depend on this ROM for piano and GM with my command station, but in spite of the problems mentioned above the overall quality is very high. After all, it was the flagship of Ensoniq, the ZR-76. Sure some of the presets have dated, but the samples are still solid so you can tweak a "dated" sound into a good one without much effort. Often it's just a case of adding a little reverb, eq, or plug in effect to help the old sound along. Now that the price has dropped to $130, it's a steal!

Submitted by Birdienumnum at 11/15/2003 15:43

Price Paid: US $129

Ease of Use: N/A
This is the sounds of the zr rom for all Proteus 2000 compatible keyboards and sound modules.

Easy to install, just take off the back plate and pop it in. This is installed in my XK-6 along with the TSCY rom and Vintage rom.

Features: N/A
It's a sound rom based on the old Ensoniq ZR-76 workstation.

Expressiveness/Sounds: 7
This is all your meat and potato sounds here. The ZR rom has a little of everything, and its GM compatible (bank 1 is all GM presets)

The pianos are as good as you're gonna get on an E-mu with coakley's perfect piano patches. The piano on the ZR is way better than the proteus pop rom.

Organs - there are a lot of good organ sounds, especially church organs. i love the cathedral organ patch. Wurly and B3 are ok.

Strings - the single strings arent that great, however the sample called String Sect is completely awesome. Its more of a string pad, but it sounds fantastic. i use it a lot.

Winds - nothing special, as good as proteus pop rom though

Brass - nothing special, way better than proteus pop rom

Guitars, Basses - not that great, but then again i play guitar

Drums - i like the drums. they sound a little fatter than the xtreme and pop roms. i tend to use the ZR drums more than the other roms.

Synths, Leads - not a lot of em. they sound ok but i use the xtreme rom for these

Misc - there are some good miscellaneous sounds mixed in like a decent Harp, Handbells, Vox, etc

Most of the GM presets are mediocre, with a few ones that shine.

Reliability: N/A

Customer Support: N/A

Overall Rating: 7
Overall i'm satisfied with the sounds for the money i paid. It does a good job of filling in the meat and potatoes sounds i need. I scrapped the Pop rom to get this, and I'm happy i did. The piano in the Pop rom couldnt get the job done, and $129 is a lot less expensive than getting a external sound module like the ME-1 or a roland.

I'd definitely buy it again if for some reason it died.

Submitted by Anonymous at 11/11/2003 22:16