I was thinking of buying...

[No name]

An old Akai s950. It's cheap as hell, and old school, not to forget the 12 bit sampling rate and all. I can get one for like 5 dollars. I should just buy it instead of asking about it, but I will anyways. So, has anyone had a chance to play with this old thing? The one i'm looking at is mint and even has the original manual.

[The Chase]

Youre probably just going to do what I did with a commodore as well as with a roland 106: play with it for a while, but then give up and just go back to the computer.

Such things are fun but generally not very productive.

The complete opposite could happen though - you could fall in love with it and have fun and use it on every track and maybe find that it actually increases productivity that way.

[Sascha Franck]

Are you playing live gigs and all?
If not, I wouldn't even spend those 5 buck on it.

[No name]

Na, no gigs or anything. To be honest I feel like I want to purchase it just to be able to play around with it and maybe every once in a while i'll have a use for it on one of my tracks. Then if I get sick and tired of it I wanted to open it up and try and study it! I'm thinking of going into school to get a degree in electrical engineering, and of coure anything having to do with music interests me especially.

So you had one? How did it work out for you when you did use it?

[Sascha Franck]

So you had one? How did it work out for you when you did use it?

No, I didn't.
Oh well, if you got no softsampler yet, you *might* find it useful, but if you have, it'll be a waste of effort.
I simply don't think the 12bit thingy would justify the efforts of setting anything up on a hardware sampler. And what else is there? Those old AKAI filters aren't sounding great either. Couldn't think of anything else...

Ah, ok, maybe sometimes it's just the right time for us to get inspired by some new things and limitations... heck, I'm a guitarist, most of my guitars are just as imperfect as it could get, yet I just love them.

So, in the end, I wouldn't know. But I still wouldn't purchase it myself either.

[Stupid American Pig]

I would buy it, even even if just to remind myself what a pain in the ass it is(not to mention how ridiculously slow) to load samples off of a floppy disk.

In 99 I bought a Roland S-330 sampler for 75 bucks. It was a 12 bit, 32khz sampler. It even came with a 9" monochrome apple monitor. The samplers interface sucked, without the monitor, patch editing and sampling would be damn near impossible. It was slow, the filters sucked and made horrible HOWLING at high resonance settings. But it did have a nice dirty 12 bit grit and would alias like hell when you starting pitching things up and down. My example came with the entire roland library of floppies. I sampled the sounds I liked into my PC and still have them today. Infact, one of the patches sounds alot like that eerie vibe at the end of Radioheads "pyramid song". I would buy another S-330 if it was less than 50 bucks and had the disks.

[deleted]

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[sonicfire]

5 bucks? you must be joking. i see $200-$300 everywhere !

[Stupid American Pig]

what if it was a more modern one, say a 3000? How hard is it to work these things and is it easy to get samples for them online (free?)

I have used a 3000. I wouldnt really call it hard to work but I would call it slow to work with. Working through the 6 line displays are just tedious with the input knob.

Samplers on the PC really are MUCH easier to deal with. The cd version of the 3000 is decently fast to load samples, but still nowhere near PCs.

[ResonantOrder]

I have a Mirage DSK-1 that is 10 bit. It samples really weird and I like to put through a couple of effects and come up with some strange soundscapes. I love it. Sometimes it's fun to play with hardware instead of looking at a computer screen all day. The glory of hardware is the ability to torture it till something strange comes out, then record it into the computer.

I'd buy an old akai sampler, but not a new one. Kontakt works better for me than the new stuff.

[ResonantOrder]

5 bucks? you must be joking. i see $200-$300 everywhere !

I've seen them go for less than 100.00 on ebay with the disks included.

[Hidenori]

I have a Mirage DSK-1 that is 10 bit. It samples really weird and I like to put through a couple of effects and come up with some strange soundscapes. I love it. Sometimes it's fun to play with hardware instead of looking at a computer screen all day. The glory of hardware is the ability to torture it till something strange comes out, then record it into the computer.

I'd buy an old akai sampler, but not a new one. Kontakt works better for me than the new stuff.

I used to use Mirage almost 15 years ago and that was sooooo nice and
very unique sound ever. Actually I'm lookiing for Mirage again but the market
price is around USD200.... Oh... it's still expensive, isn't it?

Cheers.

[james0tucson]

5 bucks? you must be joking. i see $200-$300 everywhere !

I've seen them go for less than 100.00 on ebay with the disks included.

Still a world away from $5.00

I'll buy crap for $5.00 just to tack another PCBoard on the wall. $5.00 and it's a circuit bending candidate.

[kritikon]

I've still got a S950. I'd say...for $5 you can't really say no to that. If nothing else you can probably sell it on immediately for a profit.

As for sound and use.

How should I put this diplomatically? It's a big steaming pile of liquid crocodile poo compared to even the most basic free s/w sampler? Is that succinct enough?

If you are ever going to go out gigging, then it may well be extremely useful. You often don't need a huge sample library - they can be very useful as a drum machine for example, and there is certainly enough onboard RAM for it to qualify as that.

But there will be several pitfalls if you are PC based.

1. How many recording inputs have you got? Because the S950 has 8 mono outs and 2 stereo outs that just basicall combine 4 mono inputs to each side. Which means it's extremely difficult to play things like chords, or any type of polyphonic instrument.

2. Sascha mentioned crap filters. He's certainly right about Akai filters - I never liked their resonant filters - they're just bland and dreary. However that's not a problem...the S950 doesn't actually have any resonant filters. . It has a simple non-resonant lowpass filter. Which is mostly useless for anything even vaguely creative.

3. RAM. Mine has 2.25MB RAM. That is with the extra RAM board fitted. Just look at any sample sets and see how much memory they require. An S950 can only play a small fraction of any new samples you might find. Although it will store a complete set of 909 drums and a few other hits.

4. Sound - as mentioned, it is only 12bit. It actually doesn't sound half bad though. It's OK...but that's all it is. At full bandwidth, it can sample pretty cleanly.

5. Features...it still has some useful features, but any of the commercial s/w samplers have a great deal more features in terms of looping etc. Basically all you have on the S950 is forward/backwards/alternate and one shot. Sample splice/combine and a basic 2 layers. You can alter start/end point/crossfade loop, but you can't automate it. It won't hold flash RAM - every time you turn it on, you have to load something into it to get it to work (although I suppose you can say that about any sampler) but from floppy disk. And of course at max memory it is 2.25MB and a floppy only holds 1.44MB - so you need at least 2 floppies to hold even the meagre full memory.

6. GUI. It is probably the stupidest, long windedest interface you will ever have the misfortune to use. It takes an age just to set up something basic like a drumkit. It's responsible for generations of stupid and bloated sampler GUI design, when there are obviously better ways of doing it. Every single sample you enter needs to have its range, midi channel, output, velocity settings, play mode etc set individually. It's dumb and it's irritating and it's the reason until Short Circuit that I never again got into sampling, because most s/w samplers based their GUI on the stupid Akai example.

Having said all that - they're as reliable as almost any electronic musical gadget ever made - they just never die. You can abuse them however you want and you can't kill it. (Which is rare nowadays).

It's really not a bad sound for all its flaws - I don't believe some of the bullshit I read about how hiphop producers use them for that certain 12bit hard edge they have - they simply sound a lower quality than new samplers. There's nothing magical about them, they have been superceded in every possibly way apart from sheer dogged determinedness not to die. I haven't used mine in several years now. Every now and then I read some crap about how collectable they are, and dust it off to play again...and invariably turn it off cursing under my breath for being so gullible as to believe the hype and rubbish.

I still remember it fondly - it was a marvel at the time. When samplers first emerged, the S950 was an absolute godsend and an icon. I never sold it because of that nostalgia...but seriously I never use it. A free version of Shortcircuit with only 2 note polyphony is so far in advance of an S950 that you have to smile.


So, don't buy it because of any rubbish you may have read about old samplers. But do buy it for $5, because as you say...you can take it to bits and learn stuff. Or you can make maybe $195 immediate profit to some gullible idiot who believes what they read in Rap Weekly.

It's an icon. But not because it can still hold its own in sonic or useability terms.

[butter]

Where's Hollowsun on this one? His opinion would probably be most welcome here.

Personally, I would take it for $5. Even if you mess around with it for three months and then ditch it you would probably get your $5 out of it.