Samplers

Overview

Emulation E-mu Systems are best known for their innovate development of high quality samplers, from the early 1980's until today. They can be credited with establishing the market for reasonably priced sampling, and developing it continuously for 20 years. Whilst prices have come down; features, processing power and memory have increased a 1000 times in these 20 years.

Taking an early lead in 1981 with the Emulator I, after seeing the mega expensive Fairlight CMI, E-mu Systems rapidly became the market leader through to 1988. However tough competition from the Japanese (Akai and Roland in particular) made it tough going in the late 1980's, and E-mu Systems seemed to become left behind. Then in 1993 Creative (of Sound card fame) bought E-mu Systems - thereby providing the financial backing and scale to drive the product range on. The Emulator IV range was announced and by the mid 1990's E-mu Systems were back in competition. By the end of the 1990's the EIV was upgraded to Ultra status, and dramatically brought down in price. As the new Millennium takes over E-mu Systems have the best value, easiest to operate, and best sounding samplers on the market place.

Classic Samplers The early Emulators have now become classic vintage samplers, even though they are far outclassed by the latest hardware. The reason for this is the unique sounds they produce from 8 or 12 bit sampling, some times poor anti-aliasing, and their use of warm analog SSM filters. The sample loops are sometimes rather lumpy, and the noise levels are hardly pristine, but these samplers remain excellent sources of unique sounds and magic.

Right now these early monsters can be bought for next to nothing, often 10 times less than they retailed for.

Ultra Edge The latest Ultras and ESI2000 take E-mu Systems into the new millennium with high quality low priced samplers. The hardware and software designs are based on continuous development over 20 years. The ESI operating system is effectively a modern version of the EIII OS launched in 1988. The EOS operating software has been progressively improved over more than 5 years.

E-mu Systems have remain active in developing sample libraries for the new range, and this has been critical to gaining market share in the past. Samplers make no sounds on their own, and a good sample library that exploits the potential of the Operating Systems is going to win customers. We hope E-mu Systems continues to work with third party sound developers to create unique EOS sample CDROM's.

Technical Bit The Emulator range is based on two major technology break through's. Firstly the use of computer Direct Memory Addressing (DMA) chips to access contiguous sample memory. This was the break through that enabled the Emulator I to be launched in 1981. Dave Rossum wishes he had patented it, as all samplers are based on this innovation. The Fairlight CMI Series I had to use dedicated sample memory for each voice.

Secondly the use of custom DSP chips to create digital filters, effects, and smooth sample replay and transposition. E-mu Systems had already pioneered analog synthesizer chip design with the SSM oscillator and filter chips of the late 1970's. During the 1980's and 1990's they created a range of proprietary custom digital chips from E to R. This technology undoubtedly gives Emulators there unique high quality sound.

Onto the Future What does the future hold for Emulators ? Will we see analog modelling used to process the samples ? Or perhaps 24-bit sampling, a colour and larger display, and 1G byte of sample RAM. Perhaps mLan and even Ethernet for connecting straight into the Internet. Or maybe hardware samplers will now disappear, as the PC and an internal DSP card is now powerful enough to displace all that custom hardware !! We doubt it.....

Current owners would like more software features in an Emulator 5 , than new hardware features. Although the wish list that has been compiled by users has never been formally reviewed by E-mu Systems. The latest Emulator Operating Systems will continue to be developed with new features and support for new hardware.