Re: Roland S-550 sampler?

[joseph devlin <jdevlin@WPI.EDU>]

> 
> 
> Hey all , I was just wondering if any of you are using the Roland S-550 
>sampler?
> What`s your impression of it?  Pro`s n con`s?
> 

        i had one for a little while, without scsi. id say that its not
        too bad. it has a lot of outputs, standard, which is nice;
        most samplers today seem to require an additional purchase
        to get that many outs. the outs are assignable to each sound
        within the device. id say that its pretty flexible, inside,
        since it allows you to 'reuse' samples in multiple patches,
        with different starting points and settings. it has filters,
        resonant, i dont know how id compare them to others.

        you will need a monitor to use it; its kind of a pain because
        of this. but its not that bad.

        the os comes on a disk. sampling is not easy. it requires strange
        disk manipulations. each formatted disk contains the os required to
        play the samples and edit some stuff. but most of the real
        hardcore sample editing that you can do with the machine
        requires the system disk, which is also required to sample. it
        takes a minute or two to load up; its definitely not quick
        and easy, the way sampling has been getting (and in my opinion
        the way it should be) so i dont know how thatd effect your
        creative process; frankly, the sampler was too cumbersome for
        me to want to use. i did use it to some effect, it rewarded
        me well when i spent the time to set it up, but i spent entire
        evenings sampling into the thing and only got three or four
        lousy samples into it.

        oh yeah, technically, it has four banks of 7.5 seconds a piece
        (i think) at a sample rate of 30khz. you can double the time
        to one minute by using a 15khz sampling rate. ive heard that
        its a twelve bit sampler, if that means anything to you. also,
        time is rounded up. you can have a really short sample, but the
        sampler sees it as 0.5 seconds, even if its shorter. it rounds
        everything off to the nearest 0.5s interval. 

        in general, id say its not too bad a sampler for the price,
        if you have the dedication to use it. im just used to
        pc sampling programs that allow you to grab anything you
        want at any time you want it. if thats what youd like to
        be able to do, dont get an s550.

        i just remembered: theres not too much in the way of
        sample transfer stuff for this sampler. unless you have 
        a mac, in which case you may be able to find something. the
        best i could do was to find a program which read disk
        images, and sucked the samples right out of it, saving
        them to wav files. of course, there was no way to get
        the samples back into the sampler, short of sampling
        them, and that was always a pain. and it sounded bad.

        but still, this is only one persons opinion.

        joe