Greatest Sampler Of All Time Options

[lastsound]

Hi all, am new to this board, and thought Id start the ball rolling with this question:

which sampler (soft or hardware) gets the coveted `all-time best` award...

it can be personal taste, or general `everyone knows it has to be this one`...

[cornutt]

I don't know that I have ever encountered any hardware box that I would consider the "ultimate sampler". In the early days, I had occasion to play with the original Emulator and the Ensoniq Mirage, and those definitely weren't it. I wound up eventually buying a Roland S-750, which is a tremendously flexible synth. But, as lastsound hinted it, it's definitely not the last word in terms of user interfaces, and it had some support problems.

The good:
1. Good 16-bit sound, with options for reduced sample rates when needed/wanted.
2. Good filtering and control over amplitude
3. Reponds to poly aftertouch
4. Some really neat graphical editing capabilities, very state-of-the-art at the time (such as the ability to draw an arbitrary waveform with the mouse and loop it).
5. Very flexible sample looping
6. Multi-sampling, cross-fading, and velocity switching was all very advanced for its day.

The bad:
1. Too many menus that do almost the same thing, or do the same thing but in ways just different enough to get you confused.
2. Very complex file system, and although it was good for saving disk space, it wasn't designed to be expandable when bigger disk drives came along.
3. Memory expansion was an afterthought. It required installation of an expensive board, and apparently only a few were produced since only pros were generally able to get them.
4. Certain effects (such as the offline filtering) had so many problems with intermediate-result overflows that they were pretty much unusable.