Greatest Sampler Of All Time Options

[lastsound]

Hi all, am new to this board, and thought Id start the ball rolling with this question:

which sampler (soft or hardware) gets the coveted `all-time best` award...

it can be personal taste, or general `everyone knows it has to be this one`...

[lastsound]

I'll start the ball rolling...for me personally, it has to be my trusty mpc 2000xl

[lepetitmartien]

Mhmm Emu Ultra family here. But I think there's not one best sampler, but several with different uses. All the crusty 8/12 bits one have an edge too. I just can't stand the Akai way of working/thinking/sounding.

[lastsound]

Mhmm Emu Ultra family here. But I think there's not one best sampler, but several with different uses. All the crusty 8/12 bits one have an edge too. I just can't stand the Akai way of working/thinking/sounding.

really, thats interesting, out of curiosity, which genre do you produce?

and what exactly is it about the mpcs you dont like?

i come from a rap angle, so i guess my bias towards the mpcs is natural..interesting tho...

[lepetitmartien]

I'm still trying to understand how people can make such un-ergonomic way to do things (note, i'm a graphic designer and part of my jobs are on ergonomics). I hate the automatic sample mapping of the MPCs for one. And Akai samplers i've met just sound crap to my ears. I have no interest whatsoever in the internal MPC sequencer (and it's not the subject).

Now I've found with a friend a way to make a S2000 sound good: direct the outs into a brick-wall analogue opto compressor, it can do marvels to a dispirited drum sample dulled to death once in the Akai.

The inability to correctly and reliably set up a MPC with a sequencer is a pain in the ass too.

For the style I'm more into electronica/acousmatic.
Note: I've still to meet S5000/6000 and Z4/8 samplers.

If only emu could port its cards on mac (SIGH)…

[editbrain]

mpc2000 or 1000 and an asr-10

[johntennant]

S3000xl. From leads to bass to drums, it does everything exceptionally well. I use two of these in my live show and on a club system, it blows the pants off of the vinyl.

Next up would be my mpc 2000xl. I use this guy for all my drums in my live show. But if I had to pick one, I'd go for the s3000xl because of the way it sounds.

-J

[lastsound]

I'm still trying to understand how people can make such un-ergonomic way to do things (note, i'm a graphic designer and part of my jobs are on ergonomics). I hate the automatic sample mapping of the MPCs for one. And Akai samplers i've met just sound crap to my ears. I have no interest whatsoever in the internal MPC sequencer (and it's not the subject).

Now I've found with a friend a way to make a S2000 sound good: direct the outs into a brick-wall analogue opto compressor, it can do marvels to a dispirited drum sample dulled to death once in the Akai.

The inability to correctly and reliably set up a MPC with a sequencer is a pain in the ass too.

For the style I'm more into electronica/acousmatic.
Note: I've still to meet S5000/6000 and Z4/8 samplers.

If only emu could port its cards on mac (SIGH)…

LOL, you should work for roland on the side *open mouth pose*

yeah, i guess the mpc layout is a little weak, but as a might have mentioned, coming from a hiphop/sample angle, i must say it was something i was took for granted as a cute failing in the whole `mpc as god` thing that goes on in the rap community...

interesting though lepetitmartien

This post has been edited by lastsound: Tue 24 May 2005, 00:05

[cornutt]

I don't know that I have ever encountered any hardware box that I would consider the "ultimate sampler". In the early days, I had occasion to play with the original Emulator and the Ensoniq Mirage, and those definitely weren't it. I wound up eventually buying a Roland S-750, which is a tremendously flexible synth. But, as lastsound hinted it, it's definitely not the last word in terms of user interfaces, and it had some support problems.

The good:
1. Good 16-bit sound, with options for reduced sample rates when needed/wanted.
2. Good filtering and control over amplitude
3. Reponds to poly aftertouch
4. Some really neat graphical editing capabilities, very state-of-the-art at the time (such as the ability to draw an arbitrary waveform with the mouse and loop it).
5. Very flexible sample looping
6. Multi-sampling, cross-fading, and velocity switching was all very advanced for its day.

The bad:
1. Too many menus that do almost the same thing, or do the same thing but in ways just different enough to get you confused.
2. Very complex file system, and although it was good for saving disk space, it wasn't designed to be expandable when bigger disk drives came along.
3. Memory expansion was an afterthought. It required installation of an expensive board, and apparently only a few were produced since only pros were generally able to get them.
4. Certain effects (such as the offline filtering) had so many problems with intermediate-result overflows that they were pretty much unusable.

[lepetitmartien]

interesting though lepetitmartien

Your Akai sounds Dull? Make it sound Big!