EmulatorII-list

Hi
Oberheim spotted a market gap in 1986, an EII rack mount. E-mu Systems
weren't going to produce one, but pro users wanted them for touring. Have a
look at Yes in 1986 with Tony Kaye and his banks of DPX-1s. The DPX-1 is a
black box re-engineering job, without the same electronics that Dave used.
Actually sounds rather nice. Oberheim wisely added other formats and focused
on replay to keep the electronics down in size.Quite remarkable how they got
the size down without using surface mount technology. They added hard disk,
CDROM and SCSI. If they had just used a LCD interface....
 
Designed as a sample player for the live musician, there is not enough room
for the sampling electronics and it takes more effort and code to get to
market. 
 
Then Akai entered the market with 16bit samples and the rest was history...
E-mu Systems kept with TTL technology with the oversized Emulator III, until
they finally had enough money in the bank to get customer chips made for the
complete sampler chain (F and G chips in the Emax II and EIIIX).
 
Regards
Rob
www.emulatorarchive.com

 

Was it always Oberheim's intent to release a sample player or was it
an oblique strategy because of some R&D problem? Anyone who could
really look at the boards with some insight could probably tell
whether or not it was a botched sampler. Code must have been so hard
to write in those days. [w]



 



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