emusonacid!

i can get a emu e4 with 128mb ram really cheap..is it worth it... is the ultra that much of a big difference ... can some who knows explain the differences...nice one

Okay, if you got an E4, just an E4, not an E4XT or E4blabbiddyblah or anything else, you got hooked up bigtime. It should say E IV and Emulator Four underneath that. This was the diesel unit they released in 94. It went for around $5500. It comes with only 8 MB of RAM but you can upgrade that cheap to 128. Your unit might already have 128. It's got digital input, SCSI input, 8 balanced analog outputs. That's the dope thing, it's really expensive to upgrade your number of outputs on the new units. So you're hooked up there. More or less you got a dope machine.

The new versions have way faster processors, a beat munging function, an option for a fully assignable effects card, I don't think the E4 has any effects.
They probably have better DAC's too. But if you got that thing cheap and it has 8 outputs you can do some crazy shit. The main drag is going to be the sample processing functions. You could go take a shit, come back, and it still won't be done processing. So....get a SCSI card hooked up to your PC and edit your samples in Soundforge or something.

what wrecker said, plus the option for rfx on the ultras, im using an old e6400 upgraded to eos 4.10 and it is def the bomb. And yeah i do all my editing on the pc and scsi dump over, works a treat and keeps things fast

yeh itsa EIV......128 mb ram..1GB Jaz Iomega Drive and CD Rom on DAC Rack Unit

ASCII Input and Keyboard

2GB SCSI HD with terminator

shit no fx...
thats abit kack....its only ?150 do u reckon it'll worth my while waiting and getting a ultra...
when u say processong wat do u mean....chopping and stuff ,reverse an all that ...if it takes long to do basic things like that then im not interested....i can see it becoming more of a hinderence

wat would u say a decent price is for one of these units

that's a nice machine, but whether you buy it or not depends on what you want to use it for and what sort of music you do. the Ultra samplers use the newer Coldfire processors and are quicker at number crunching, but more importantly, have better midi timing! In my experience the older samplers were simply not up to it and i had to sell mine and buy an ultra. even my old EPS16+ samplers could play back tighter.

I'm doing hyper programmed drill n'bass shit and the E4XT Ultra is able to deal with it OK. If you're going to be doing stuff that is less phrenetic or more drone/pad based the Classic EIV should be fine.

guys- I bought an e4x very cheaply & sort-of by accident while trying to get into authoring custom sound roms for my p2k (which qv elsewhere...)

the e4x is definitely the diesel unit of the emulator range- that's a good comparison- & is low on number-crunching power.
however, for a few hundred quid, you need never again need to worry about where to put y'r huge banked keyboard sounds. mine was about ?300 inc 2-day shipping from california & it has 128 voices, 128Mb ram & a 1Gb hard drive, + the ascii & aes socketry. the effects are the normal rudimentary variety (like the esi range- just reverb & delay, & no midi control) but they'll get you out of a fix & are fine for basic keyboard sounds.
so basically, in an average studio (if there is such a thing) the e4x is the machine that eventually just gets taken for granted, & in a year's time you'll wonder how you managed without it.
a ute, as the australians might say.

for sequences & percussion/loops, you should probably use a newer machine like one of the ultras (& these are quite cheap now too).

duncan.