meatballfulton wrote:Ensoniq EPS or EPS-16. Polyphonic aftertouch and multitrack sequencer are unique features.
Nice crunchy aliasing / transposition too (the original EPS, anyway). They're got a meaty sound generally. Even the non-resonant digital filters have a nice character of their own.
madtheory wrote:Yes the wonderful Roland digital filters. I often wondered if the S-50 used the same filter tech as the D-50.
No real-time filters in the S-50, it's the 550 only - the S-50 has offline filtering which is not terribly useful.
The S-50 is kind of fun with the monitor and tablet (graphical envelope editing!), but don't really feel it's much more than an interesting historical piece for the modern user. It doesn't have the instant useability of a lot of the other vintage samplers out there, and the sound's not hugely characterful.
madtheory wrote:Akai S612 looks like fun to me, but I've never used one. Popular as well, so expensive.
S700 and X7000 are also very similar but more fully featured (multisampling, etc). Same lo-fi Akai sound though, and a similarly immediate interface (nothing is more than two button presses away). Quickdisks are usually dead by now, so it's only really an option if you're happy baking fresh samples every time (but like I said, that's super easy on these).
madtheory wrote:Propher 2000 ya it's got an analogue filter, but is horrible to use and is otherwise quite hifi sounding I think, although I've never used one (just heard recordings).
Yup, sounds great but induces embolisms to use. If you can get
Prophet 2012 working with it, it's a revelation. Fun for squelchy percussion with those shrieky CEMs. On the lower sample rate you can definitely get some crunch out of it, with the right samples.