I’ve recently bought a p2000. I’ve owned lots of E-MU gear over the decades and have serious fondness for them. Last Proteus I owned was a p2500 with extra roms which I loved but it took up a bit too much room in the end, although I always regretted selling it. The p2000 is basically identical apart from the Sequencer and extra 4 control knob functions and is just a single rack.
My Digitakt is dedicated to sequencing the p2k and it pairs up well apart from bank changes are a bit awkward due to DT only having MSB. You have to create an LSB (cc32) and p-lock it. The Proteus uses both, MSB (bank on the DT) selects the ROM ID and LSB selects the bank of that ROM. User Presets are MSB 0 and the Composer is 4. The great thing about this combination is that the DT allows p-locking Program changes and the Proteus responds instantaneously which leads to very interesting Sequences! I’ve been doing that a lot lately.
Elektron have just added LSB to the DN (although it’s currently broken) so I’m hopeful that it will make it to the DT soon, which would make life much easier.
As for sound, there are so many instruments it’s hard to imagine not getting something you like, plus with the 12 knob assignments you can use them with the DT CCs to p-lock them. If you are into editing, the E-MU architecture is extremely deep and sophisticated. There is a free editor called Prodatum which works well, but it’s not too bad to do from the front considering the complexity. I find the sound quality to be excellent, emu had superb repitching algorithms in their hardware and plenty of very good sounding filters. The p2k also has an advanced arpeggiator per midi channel (32) which can be the usual type or a programmable type with 100 storage locations. Prodatum makes editing these much easier though.
The one downside is the FX which aren’t great and the routing is not what you would expect, basically you assign effect amounts to the physical outputs. I prefer to disable them and currently route the 3 output pairs directly into other gear. There’s a setting to disable them at the global level.
The hardware is well built but the data encoders are the weak point and often end up skipping values, but they are pretty simple to replace, just 5 solder points and good as new. You can get the encoders for a few dollars/pounds. I’ve also replaced the display in mine which had faded quite a bit.
For $90 it’s an absolute bargain! I wouldn’t be interested in the keyboard personally, it’s half the polyphony of the p2k if I remember correctly.
