akai S-20, aliasing?

[Sir Ruff]

I've been reading about the S-20, and am intrigued to see that it does not contain an anti-aliasing filter... Can anyone confirm the degree of aliasing grit that is possible with this thing? I see it has some pretty low sample rates, but am not sure how 16-bit aliasing would compare to say, 8 or 12-bit samplers.

[madtheory]

Where did you read that? It's not correct AFAIK. The S-20 is basically the same engine as the S2000. These alias a bit, but not very much.

Aliasing is to do with the sampling rate, not the bit depth. With samplers it's a little more complicated because there is transposing. How the transposing is done that has the biggest effect on the "sound" of the sampler. Among other things, that requires anti aliasing as well. The simplest method is to have an LPF track the keyboard e.g. Fairlight CMI. EMU led the way with DSP based trickery. It's

What do you mean by "saw"?

[Sir Ruff]

"saw" = I read it on teh internets

No, I've come across a couple different forums where users state that the S-20 is basically an S-01 without the anti-aliasing filter. It seems like such an esoteric bit of knowledge, I don't doubt that it's probably true.

[Headphones.40]

I'd like to find the pdf manual, but all that ever comes up is the S01 manual, but not the S20. There was one site that has it, but I refuse to pay their $9 fee to print it up....

[treezyz]

the zoom sampletrak has some real nice aliasing when sampling in 16hz and tuning down (for example sampling a record at 45+10% and tuning back to normal.) cheap too, 16 bit but low-fi sound.

can't speak on the s20, the sampletrak is all i need for that type of unit so never tried any of the yamaha SU series, sp-202, akai s20 etc.

[editdelete]

Where did you read that? It's not correct AFAIK. The S-20 is basically the same engine as the S2000. These alias a bit, but not very much.

I believe the S20 is a tabletop S01, not 2000. The S20 was my 1st sampler (if u dont count casio sk1). I bought another w maxxed out RAM a few years ago, but lent it out and I'm eagerly awaiting its return this weekend. It does get very crunchy, and aside from the Reverse function, since it has no filters, pitch and resampling at a lower rate is one of the few ways to edit a pad's sound.

[gmeredith]

since it has no filters, pitch and resampling at a lower rate is one of the few ways to edit a pad's sound

Maybe that's what the internet references were referring to, and confused them with anti-aliasing filters??