And adding a pair of fantastic converters, or options like proper analog transformers and other modern niceties would be really cool. I feel that the industry was a little too quick to jump head first into software for sampling, and it’s pretty easy to see why that might be - it offers the ability to build whatever you like, both hard and soft (you choose the converter, pre, etc) to form a super-sampler of the sort I could only dream about in the 80s or 90s. However, I also feel that the hardware sampler has been brought back to life as a specialty machine, with different instruments providing variations on only a few themes. It’s astonishing to me that I can’t map as many velocity layers on a brand new MPC as I could on my 33 year old EPS.
The time is ripe for a reassessment of the hardware sampler as a comprehensive platform for building great-sounding and playable instruments. In the past, the high cost of DSP power and memory forced compromises. No longer. I want my super-Emulator, dammit.