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Author Topic: Amiga 1000 or early Kickstart 1.2 A500 era expensive sound sampler?  (Read 1186 times)

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Offline Amiga_NutTopic starter

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I was trying to find that sampler that was always the most expensive in early group tests and had nice physical rotary controls on the front of something the size of a modem but couldn't remember the name. I did a google image search for it but nothing jogged my memory sadly. Any ideas? I am sure it started with Audio and was an American product.

I heard this was the best sampler in terms of quality of signal fed into/reaching the parallel port.
 

Offline Amiga_NutTopic starter

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Re: Amiga 1000 or early Kickstart 1.2 A500 era expensive sound sampler?
« Reply #1 on: September 23, 2017, 05:21:16 PM »
Hey, great response, thanks to everyone. It may be the one in the first response picture shown, quite a few decades ago now since I even thought about it. Certainly that sort of form factor case and definitely did have rotary dial controls.

I read a little while ago that to actually get the best possible samples it is best to use an 8 bit sampling method rather than convert 16 bit samples (which on the plus side are easy to extract digitally therefore perfect). Before that there is a gap of a few decades since I last thought about Amiga sampler reviews/ratings :)

Long story short I wanted to carry on where I left things off at the end of the 80s doing creative things with my OCS Amiga ie I knew how to do all sorts of graphical things but apart from a few times recording audio samplers I never really explored it which is a shame because 8 bit doesn't necessarily mean bad audio quality as a source for musical instruments. Digi-view definitely benefits from using modern digital solutions as source but perhaps with audio it is not the case and it will be fun to test that claim out too.

Hence I need one of the best (ie least degrades input audio quality) hardware samplers out there. As someone mentioned the audio quality of Technosound II is not great but I seem to remember a couple units were rated highly in roundups for the sound quality (using like for like input signal and connecting cables) in a round up. DSS+ was also another one.  

I will have a look through my old magazines, I also recently got about 100 Commodore mags and half still have cover disks sealed and still stuck on the front which I need to go through so we might get lucky :)
 

Offline Amiga_NutTopic starter

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Re: Amiga 1000 or early Kickstart 1.2 A500 era expensive sound sampler?
« Reply #2 on: September 23, 2017, 05:36:41 PM »
Quote from: psxphill;830944
I had a technosound, mainly because everyone had a sampler & it was the thing to have.

The sound quality was pretty bad, but then that may have been the source quality.... vinyl/audio cassette/tv.

Later on I had a aura 16 bit pcmcia sampler for the A1200 and by then I had a portable cd player, so the results were a lot better. However the pcmcia connector on it was made of a really soft plastic, and I needed to swap it with another peripheral. Which ended up destroying the connector on the sampler and the A1200. At some point I hope to get that fixed.

The best thing about that one was that it had a hard disk record function, which allowed me to record the backwards episode of red dwarf. I then wrote a program in C that reversed the entire file. My video recorder at the time could do perfect 1x rewind but without sound, it was just a case of syncing the two together.

Of course in the modern era it's just a matter of going on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAsjfCq8GDU

I don't know how may people did that, but the bit at 5:40 made me think I was probably in a minority in the 90's.

I slowed down babylon zoo's spaceman as well.

I was always disappointed that there wasn't a program like cooledit, that worked with all samplers.


Some samplers could be used with third party software but not all, there was no standard which is why after the A1000 they probably should have put two input DACs inside the Amiga as the cherry on the icing for a phenomenal multimedia system package and standardise sampling as software model for developers.

And yes I did also mess about with fast/slow sampling, another seemingly slowed down/speeded up tune was Chemical Brothers Elektrobank.

I've got the full reversed Backwards episode with my collection of Red Dwarf extras but oddly never even knew it. It is more of a Hawkwind space-rock style effect on the vocal track you can see now :)