Age 31. Been using Emus for 6 years. Prior to that I had a Fairlight IIx and a Series III rev 7. I had a gap of about 18 months of no sampler, infact doing little to no music before I started up again. I couldn't afford another Series III so I listened to a few buddies and went out and bought an E6400 with an extra MIDI in.
I state this on record, as an ex-Fairight owner, that the EMU EIV range is very close to the Fairlight sound, and in some regards even superceeds it.
I'm not talking about paper specs, more what you can actually do with a sound once you have it, and also what the straight sample "feels" like.
I had anpother gap of about 6 motnhs where I gave up on the hardware and went all software based. Tried the ESX24, Halion and Kontakt. I was perfectly happy with what I was doing, and then went back and listened to my Emu and earlier Fairlight mixes and was so stunned how much quality I'd lost.
I rapidly went out and purchased an E-Synth Ultra Pimped out with RFX, 32 Midi channels, extra poly and ADAT I/O. Apart from a few nasty screwups like the RFX crashing the E-Synths PSU its been beautiful.
Sonically it's second to none, build quality, whilst not perfect far exceeds most expectations.
I still miss my 12" screen, FFT and Harmonic resynthesis analysis though.. ;-)