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`...

I really can't pick one over the other, they all sound different and are used for different things.
I have and use An Emax se., An Emax II, An EIIIX and E4X Turbo, an Akai S-1100 and a Kurzweil K25000rs. First sampler I used was a fairlight II CMI. It was a beast and I really had nothing to jugde it against. from their I got my own sampler, a SCI prophet 2000, the Emax a SP202 or SU10 (they both were used as scratch pads and were sold off not long after I got them.) Followed with ther kurzweil and everything else.
I use the Emu's and the Kurzweil for things with more of a synthesis based need (filters, lots of modulation routings) The Emu's are Best Suited for bass and low midrange, or anything that makes use of it's filters.
I know the Akai's catch a lot of flack but I find them usefull for things I don't want to change much and play back fairly close to the source material. The Effects can also be used to warp sounds into washes of ambience (think FSOL) playing back drums/loops back and running them through a tube EQ and compressing them makes for a good match. I find the Kurzweil is the real workhorse, it's truly a great synthesizer with the added sampling, you can take a sample and process it through the algorithms and use many types of synthesis to make a sound far more complex then a sample alone could ever yeild.
I'n short., we live in an age of software, in which our favorite and least faorite pieces of sampling hardware has bottomed out in price, so buy a few things and find uses for them all their own.
In closing, I also use a kontakt/Reaktor/trio of macs set up and I always find myself going back to the hardware, sitting on the floor twisting dials, we live in fairly good times.
I have a question for everyone here too, starting off I always sampled from the machines interfaces and as time went by ended up using a few sample editors and then midi-dumps, then scsi dumps.but, Lately even though terribly more time consuming I'm finding myself sampling through the samplers A/D converters and interface more and more. has anyone had a similar situations?