On the other side I see ASR10 here for like 300$ - 400$, not too big money to try… Especially if it has maxed RAM and usb instead floppy drive and / or SCISI.
I really interested in putting some field recs / texture loops into layers and play such sounds polyphonically, apply loop point modulation to some, set volume zones for different layers, etc. Should be very expressive and “playable”.
Yeah it can be hard to learn! A big part of my wanting to get it was because hip hop was what got me really into music, it was the gateway for me to learn a lot of other music and wanting to start producing and sampling, and I wanted to experience using a machine that a lot of my favorite beats were made on. So I usually use it to make simple hip hop beats when I’m in that mood. For when I’m in a more serious mood of making music in a focused way, I usually use Omnisphere for all my sample based synthesis needs. Omnisphere is really good for that kind of stuff and will get you results way faster than learning the intricacies of the ASR…but there are pros and cons for each! I think I would use the ASR more if I had more space in my studio. It takes up a lot of space and is extremely heavy so you need room and a sturdy stand to use it. It would make a good master keyboard though, the keys feel pretty good and it has poly aftertouch!
Yeah, Omnisphere is a real gem 
Since I’m doing soundtracks / film / theater productions sometimes it’s one of main sound sources.
Using it mostly with internal library and just tweak / shape presets a bit, but definitely should try to dive deeper with it.
One of my favourites electronic albums, as mentioned earlier, was made with ASR10. Sucha lovely sound…
Love that album 
The more I use it, the more I can appreciate how incredible the feature set of the EPS 16 Plus is. I’ve gotten a few more samplers from subsequent years (E-MU ESI-4000 and Akai s5000) and the depth of the Ensoniq’s possibilities never ceases to amaze me. Sure, there’s no timestretch as on late 90s offerings, but now I’m wondering: do I even really need it? And perhaps the filters are lacking in character, but the 16+ already gets character just from the ability to downsample/resample/turn the anti-aliasing filter off. Later 90s units did a solid job at nixing aliasing altogether to the extent that they barely impart a sound merely by recording into the machine. If you want a sampler with character, the 16+ just has it.
So after a year there’s still no new hardware in this direction… even no interesting new sampling software…
me 
I’ll try to tl;dr this – I had similar issues with Alchemy & a Mirage a few years ago. I narrowed it down to something in the middle of (1) being on PowerPC instead of 68k and (2) using the Alchemy OMS driver instead of direct serial MIDI.
Alchemy & Mirage & 68k & basic serial MIDI: 
Alchemy & Mirage & PPC & OMS: 
I suspect there’s a bug (off-by-one or bit manipulation error?) or timing issue somewhere in the plumbing of 68k-emulation vs PPC-native code between Alchemy and OMS. (I may, or may not, have verified this at the time by using Alchemy in OMS mode on a 68k and finding it worked – but in this config, kind of irrelevant to use OMS when using a basic serial MIDI interface and no OMS clients.)
On PPC with OMS, it was very reproducible that the first ‘page’ (256 bytes?) of Mirage sample data would disappear or corrupt, if I simply did a ‘send to Mac’, & then a ‘reverse’ operation, followed by a ‘send to Mirage’. The only 100% remedy was to use a real 68k Mac. By that time, I also preferred to use a basic serial port MIDI interface, because the variables and settings involved in using multiport interfaces added additional annoying & sometimes unreliable complexities (I remember some ‘direct mode’ setting with a MOTU Timepiece AV…), and because my Opcode Studio 5 blew up. I wrote this up around that time (the top part refers to the Opcode Studio 4, and probably has little to do with this problem):
Because of the amount brainspace this (still!) occupies for me (and masochism), I would still like to try this with a beige PPC desktop/tower Mac (with built-in serial ports) but I don’t have access to one right now (I currently have a surplus of beige/Snow White 68k hardware though). The reason is:
…but in my experience (if I recall correctly) using OMS & Preferred Device on PPC PowerBook is subject to the same bug I started this post with (lost/corrupt page of Mirage data).
ps - I 
Sample Wrench, it just doesn’t support Mirage.
