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It’s great how you uploaded this video when you did, Jeffrey. I’ve been somewhat obsessed over the last few days since you uploaded it with how these samplers (and the “big daddy” they were rooted him the Emulator II) were harnessed in the mid 80s. I play little trivia games with myself about synthesizer history. One of them is the course from hearing players like Mike Pinder, John Lennon, Rick Wakeman, Rick Wright, Tony Banks, (Neil Diamond’s) Alan Lindgren, John Paul Jones and others playing string tapes on the Mellatron which gave way to the string machines, then analog polyphonic synths, Yamaha-style additive synths and - samplers. The usage of the Emulator II (hardly a low-shelf sampler, I know) by Pet Shop Boys on the 1985 remake of “West End Girls” is like the pinnacle of how keyboards like it had succeeded the Mellatron. That’s most true of that string ensemble tone, their usage of it owing a deep debt to those musicians I mentioned above.

cant even pronounce Moog correctly.

Korg EX800 👀 That "sawtooth" has to be a classic 😊

Without EMU samplers? This mean that you didn't sense the hype of owning EMU sampler in the 80s.

I don’t agree about the U220 ( as long as you didnt pay too much), if you have a lot of analog but need some “real” instruments & on a tight budget it was just the thing ( I still like its piano....that said I bought the P330 piano module for no good reason - never used so it was a waste of money 😅. I also got the mc808- lack of screen made it PIA to me... I should have got the mc909- which I did & still have 10years later🙂

Piano patch is a revelation:)

I'd argue the DSS-1 is a polysynth with flexible sound sources.

love the way my E5000 Ultra colors the sound of anything i sample into it, mine has a 20gig internal hard drive and i want to use it to track my bass through it just for the warmth and then dump the wav file into Ableton. i also want to convert it to USB and take out the floppy drive. wish i had the FX card.

The telharmonium predates the hammond

The optical Ins and Outs of the A5000's expansionboard are S/PDIF only, no ADAT. BTW, I installed more silent fan and an SSDdrive into my Emu4XT ultra to make it super quiet.

The Akai S5/6K are simply the best sounding HW samplers available. Even Kontakt with current Apogee DA's doesn't come near in sound quality.

Yes, S5000/6000 was the correct answer. The best rack samplers ever made, and very undervalued.

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The SR-16 doesn’t have a rotary encoder. That’s actually just a big volume knob. On the newer SR-18, it is a rotary encoder. Unfortunately, when you’re in pattern mode on the SR-18, it’s easy to accidentally change patterns by bumping the encoder.

Mirage "thumb drive option"? You mean Gotek USB floppy drive emulator? The very first all-metal Mirage (with Pratt Reed keybed and square buttons) can DEFINITELY take a Gotek just perfectly; I installed a mod'ed Gotek (FlashFloppy/OLED/Rotary Pushbutton) in one I had couple years ago. Also, load time on Mirage is quite fast (only loading 64 or 128 kB, max), maybe 10-25 seconds. Also, floppy was originally only ≈400kB, SSDD, not 720kB. And nobody was "waiting" for tech to get better at Ensoniq; they developed the DOC chip at heart of Mirage/ESQ-1/SQ-80/Apple IIGS from scratch.

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I have three of these, the Mirage, S550 and S900, and my other hardware sampler is a Kurzweil K2500RS which is kind of a remarkable value relative to its price when it was new. I'm not sure top-quality converters, lots of memory and multitimbrality are as valuable as they were, now most things are better done in-the-box and hardware samplers utility is in their unique sounds. My first sampler was a Digidesign Samplecell card and that was pretty incredible at the time but wouldn't make a lot of sense today, it's basically a plugin that requires you to have an old Mac running OMS [shudder].

The Roland S-760 is beast and often overlooked. Dream list: Akai S5000 Yamaha A4000 Roland S-760 EMU ESI-2000 Ensoniq EPS-16

There has definitely been some deals if you catch them, i got an E4XT for less than $700 but it is missing the rack ears, and a S5000 that looked like it had the expansions and it turned out to have the effect card, voice expansion and output expansion, but a broken data encoder that was a simple fix if you can solder. Now it just take patience learning these older tools. Both needed updates to the OS.

I had a poly800 back in the day, and found it very limited, though not bad sounding. I sold it as soon as I could afford better stuff. Now, almost 40 years later I realised it has a sound no other synth could make. So I bought it again for about the same price I sold it 35 years ago, but this time in EX800 format. No reason to keep the keyboard… now the waiting is for Hawk 800 to complete his new OS for the Poly 800. Doing this, no more battery issues, the granularity and MIDI issues should be gone, and modulation capabilities will be a lot more extended than ever before. Old sound in a new environment.

Thoroughly enjoyed this.Can you do an analysis top 11 of hardware recording units e.g. Roland VS2400CD Tascam Yamaha Zoom etc and even an 11 of reel based recorders (last of the dinosaurs) Best wishes

now a days....the best hardware sampler bang per buck is a percussion multi-pad. long ago, i got a used Emu Esi-32, Awesome sampler, but what killed it was the floppy disks or the SCSI ... you SCSI computer goes down, and your back to floppies.

The dss1 was a real stinker though , heavy lugger, raspy metallic quite thin soundquality that had to be beefed up using its filters , a very very slow diskdrive and the synthesis fuctions ( like sync for sampleoscs) for samples sounded better on paper than in use

The tx16w wasn't that hard to use , once you had setup a multi program and saved to floppy you just had to fly in new samples from the edit buffer and resave as a new copy of your multi

Again, great work and research. I myself was just fascinated by samplers as a child, because of the price, but also the look of it. Fairlights gave the impression that they automatically stood above synths. 🎼 In 1983 there was a regular radio show in Austria with fairlight pioneer Klaus Prünster. He marketed his device simply as Erdenklang Computer ("earth sound computer"). 🤣 Radio listeners were asked to send sounds on tape. Selected ones had the "honor*" to be processed by the "earth sound computer" in a composition. I was always totally blown away.

I had the EPS 16 and later the FZ-1 hooked up to an Atari ST w/ Cubase 3 running. That was my DAW in 1996....

The EPS16 was a gamechanger for the hiphop and rap music movement in Sweden in the late 80´s

I worked with the DSM-1 sampling backup vocals in 1989 it sounded pretty good. The TX16W i was the responsible salesman for in the musicstore. Do i need to point out i had issues getting my head around the workflow ? 😄 Sounded good though, 16 voices was a bit cool.

In this case, I’d say skip the vintage hardware and get yourself an Akai MPC, Maschine plus, Roland MV-1, or Roland SP404 II for under 1k. If hardware is your thing, those will get you further down the road than vintage gear. The vintage gear is for personal enjoyment or if you have experience with them. Otherwise, they have been superseded.

I can't agree with the review of the Yamaha A5000. I reviewed the 4000 variant of it when it came out and subsequently bought one, despite already owning an Akai and using Logic Audio for digital recording. It carried its weight spec-wise for other machines at the same price point when released, but it was way more useful as an instrument thanks to the edit capabilities. It almost became a full synth with waveforms you can supply yourself. But where it really shone was the filters. There was noting out at the time that had anywhere near the creative possibilities that the filters on this machine had. I used to take drum loops and turn them into industrial-sounding acid basslines and melodies. A beast of a sampler.

There were quite a lot of bargain models from emu (before they got binned to Creative...curse their name ) ESI32, ESI4000. and let's not forget the akai s2000. Actually...let's;-)

I am starting to get super pumped when a new video drops. Quickly becoming one of my fav channels :)

You published it! I was looking forward to this video. Out of curiosity, what do you think of the Akai Z4/Z8? They're the follow-up to the A5000/A6000, although construction quality is reputedly less.

I’m sure the Juno will always hold its own. As I comment, I’m not finished digging the Tron references.

Thanks such a fan of some of the amazing patches unique to this synth but can’t justify ( another😊) big , unreliable old keyboard, I know roland did software version (the closest in hardware is the MV30 but it will only load D70 sounds not full patches) .But it’s rom must be so tiny 😄 it’s shame Roland hasn’t added a D70 mode to their plug in or boutiques ( unlike the D50😢)...ps. Yes it does read some but not all of the U110/220 cards.

I think maybe the reason you don't currently own any drum machines is because you have a history of using drum machines with unpleasant interfaces! The 707 is the only one of those that looks fun to program. 😂 Well... the HR-16 looks a lot like the MMT-8, and people love that thing. If you're buying a physical drum machine you're either doing it because of the interface, or you're doing it for some kind of nostalgia. You can get a TR-6S for under $300 on Reverb, and that has all the ACB 808/909/707/727/CR-78 sounds and a bunch of other stuff. Or maybe you want to play with the knobs on something analog, then a used Behringer RD-9 is a lot of fun. If it doesn't have a good interface, I'm going to sequence it with something else, and then I might as well use an M1 or some random rompler that has a ton more sounds than any drum machine. Well, unless you want to sequence something analog externally, then you definitely need a Jomox, or a ridiculous eurorack percussion setup. That would be hilarious if the MBase was someone's first/only drum machine. An MBase and a SQ-1! Now that's a good first drum machine!

Great video, brought a smile to my face! Happy birthday Jeff's Juno 106!

The Wavestation came out in 1990 😁😁

I would enjoyed going to that party however that Robot "Janice" on the right has just too many screws loose.😜🎶🎹🎶Play On

The Poly 800 was the first polyphonic synth I ever played, so I will always have a soft spot in my heart for it. My band couldn't afford a synth, so Gary Holt (who ran a studio) loaned us one before we recorded some tracks with him. Great guy.

If I understood it correctly, this was your Juno's birthday as well as your own. If that's the case, all the best to you too! Even though I regularily studied synth magazines since I'm 12, not even I managed to keep any keyboard or even the drum machine, that I received for confirmation, alive for about 40 years. Almost anything ever wanted came, but with a significant delay, ... thankful if not overwhelmed , that it even came tr,ue. 🙏 Btw nice Juno-sounds & playing!

By the way, recently I made a 100% copy of Madonna's Open your heart. Can't post in on SoundCloud (even not as professional user) because of copy rights. That is a compliment, because apparently it is that well made that Soundcloud recognizes it as the original... LOL

Hi Jeffrey, since recently, I get the "Video unavailable Playback on other websites has been disabled by the video owner' message in the playback window. Check your settings please. Can't see your videos any more...

Great piano patch! I always wrote off the Junos because they had only one oscillator per voice. But with pwm, chorus, and the dead simple interface, it was a gateway drug for many.

Hi Jeffrey, if I lived in your neighborhood, I would bring that D-70 back to life for you at no charge as I am a retired 71 year old electronic service technician with time on my hands, I have here in New Zealand restored keyboards which include in my collection the Roland XP-50 and the Korg 01/wfd model among numerous other well known brands, thanks for this episode on You Tube, cheers.

The andromeda is very expensive and already highly sought after. A good one is the EMU E4K which is a feature heavy sampler with a very high quality seven octave range keyboard attached, it has multiple outputs, dual FX card as standard, 64 note polyphonic, amazing Z plane filters, up to 128mb ram, fully editable with samples that are compatible with the EMU Ultra range and sounds fantastic. It’s the rack E4X in keyboard form and can be picked up for £200 upwards. It’s different from the later Ultra sampler range with better AD/DA converters and a wider stereo image. You’re welcome.

Wonderful memories Get an 80's drum machine and do a set of themes Maybe composed by you to avoid the strikes. Have an idea for another video.Imagine you have to uproot to a different country or planet and had a choice of 11 items to carry what would be your choice and why.Incude also drum machines keyboards recording equipment(non DAW as you may not have internet/computer access, unless you include a computer,software and interface as an item) and acoustic stuff(a guitar and microphone) and pedals/multieffects.

Em 1985 meu pai vendeu um carro e comprei 1 casio cz 1000 e 1 juno 106 que tenho até hoje.uso ele como controlador no fl studio,tem duas vozes com problema mas vou arrumar.um abraço do Brasil.

I can imagine the scare of having the synth just stop in the heat. But it came back and is going strong. Excellent.

When you said this is the oldest gear, you were watching around the room and I thought "It's about time he does a home studio tour video"....