emusonacid! legacy

Hey,

I am a bit keen on getting Yamaha A3000 v2, anyone have firsthand experience with that machine? In the spec it say it has waveforms build in, what kind of.. does it works like a rompler aswell??

Is it a good supplement to the Emu Ultra?

my friend who had an emu and decided he hated it bought one and now has an a5000 too and he loves them. he says they couldnt be easier to use, and that theyre well designed and built. he wants me to give one a try. i may eventually. sorry no direct experience with them.

ok.. this is a3000 v2, and not the a5000. one big diffrent between them is that the a4000/a5000 is having a large screen. the a3000 have a small on.

I used an a3000 v2 for years. It was quite a cool sampler. Not as nice as an e-mu IMO, but it did have some interesting features. The effects were fun, but not super tweakable. LOTS of EQ options, which was great for getting things to sit in a mix when I didn't have enough mixer to create good seperation. Also good for dealing with different rooms and systems. I stopped using mine when its second hard crashed. The first time it happened I must have lost four or five years worth of original samples (thousands of hours of synth progrmming), sequences, sys-ex back-ups and ideas. I was devastated. The second time it happened, a year or two later, I vowed that that was to be the end of that.

As long as the one you get has good encoders, a good input section (as some tend to get burnt out), a good HD and you back it up externally just in case, I'd say that the a3000 is a decent workhorse. It's not nearly as nice as an E-mu, as far as sample sound quality, and the filters are not as good, but you can get it to do some cool things, and it is fun as an instrument in its own right. As far as the ROM waves... meh. They were kind of boring. Better to sample a complex form and get it to do something interesting.

Would I call it a supplement to an E-mu Ultra? Not really, no. I'd say you'd do a LOT better to get something like a DSI Evolver, or a Waldorf Pulse or a Nord uMod or something else that is small, with low polyphony, and fun programming but makes really cool sounds. Then you get to really put the horsepower of the E-mu to use and both supplement each other.

$.02

I owned an a3k, you can get some great sounds out of it but IMO the optical knobs suck oliphant cock and the SCSI transfer is so slow it's crazy. My Akai S1000 had a SCSI transfer time that was less than a TENTH of the a3k's transfer time. I think I found out that the transfer rate was around 30K per second. Horrible!

Not a big fan of the editing either. The Akai was a lot faster to use.

ehasting wrote:ok.. this is a3000 v2, and not the a5000. one big diffrent between them is that the a4000/a5000 is having a large screen. the a3000 have a small on.

i was saying my friend has both and loves them.

Since my studio temporarily boasts both a Yamaha A3000 and an EMu E5000 Ultra, with many of the same samples loaded in both, I can make a fairly objective comparison.

First impressions, on sound the EMu seems to have a clearer upper-mid and while it has the same weight in the bass end, it also seems more focussed in the bass whereas the A3000 now seems slightly woolier. That said, the A3000 does sound nice.

On facilities I'm going to miss the A3000 effects. Particularly the Leslie which when coupled with the onboard overdrive can turn even the most limp hammond sample into John Lord (I'll have to work out how the EMu programmers got the Leslie effect on some of their presets...) and the layered model where a multi can override/vary parameters in a sample or sample group is pretty handy. The delays are more flexible but the EMu ones are more than sufficient. Another nice feature is that you can route an external signal through the effects, allowing you to press it into use as a pretty serious FX processor at the same time as it does sampling. Pity it doesn't have inputs on the back...

On usability there simply is no comparison. What takes a minute on the EMu takes five on an A3000. Patch changes are instantaneous on the EMu. You can use more of the 128Mb of RAM on the EMu - the A3000 has a 500 sample limit I hit way before I get to even 80Mb. SCSI loading from the hard drive on the A3000 takes a -real- age, 3 or 4 minutes to load 80Mb of samples. Translation of Akai programs is incomplete - it's not that hard to assign an imported sample bank to a multi but if you're auditioning a lot of stuff and the clock is ticking you don't want that. I'm a guitar synth player and I want to have some presets called on sequential channels - one for each string - so I can do polyphonic bends. To get this on the Yamaha is a little convoluted and simply eats up preset memory (but not sample RAM...). On the emu I send the patch change command 6 times...

All in all, I see why people keep them in their racks as an effects unit that can be pressed into service as a sampler. They are excellent value for money at current eBay rates - but life is simply too short!

Anyone want to by a maxed out A3000 - 128Mb, SCSI, HDD, extra 8 outputs?

Steve