Emu ESi32

News of the ESi32 has set the hearts of ambitious but fiscally challenged samplists beating faster. Mike Barnes brings you this exclusive review of the machine which packs EIII sampling power into a box costing under £1200, and wonders "Is it too good to be true?"

Emu have never been particularly interested in producing a 'budget' sampler, instead choosing to build innovative but expensive powerhouse samplers such as the Emulator 1, 2 and 3 from the early to mid '80s and the recently‑announced E4. Their cheaper Emax range was well‑liked and pretty successful, but the Emax II (like Akai's S900/S950) has started to age as sampling innovations and sampler features have moved on. With the S760, Roland set a new price/performance point in the sampling world, and effectively said "catch us if you can" to the rest of the manufacturers. Many thought that Emu would bow out of the cheaper end of the sampler market, or maybe try and repackage the Emax II design at a lower price. Instead, they decided to build yet another powerhouse sampler, only this time, somehow, cheaper.The ESi32, which I became acquainted with on my recent visit to San Francisco for the AES Convention, is the result, and turns out to be very much the brother of the EIIIXS (sharing the same display, voice architecture and the majority of software screens).

Specifications

The ESi32's basic hardware specification is as good a starting point as any, so here it is.The 19‑inch, 2U Rack is 32‑voice polyphonic (16‑voice stereo) with 32 digital resonant 4‑pole filters, and 16‑part multitimbral, with 2Mb RAM as standard (expandable to 32Mb). There are two quarter‑inch unbalanced sample inputs for mono/stereo 16‑bit sampling (at 44.1 or 22.05kHz), and four quarter‑inch individual unbalanced polyphonic outputs (18‑bit), the usual complement of MIDI In/Out and Thru connectors, two expansion slots (for SCSI and Digital I/O boards) and a 3‑pin IEC power connector (yes, with a 100‑240V auto sensing supply for those that are internationally inclined). RAM is fitted internally in two 30‑pin SIMM slots, and the operating system is stored in flash EPROM for instant boot‑up.

For all those '90s men who find the inside as interesting as the outside, if you remove the lid from the ESi32, you can see just how busy Emu have been since the EIIIX. All the main components are isolated on a single, all‑new, incredibly neat and compact motherboard containing Emu's custom LSIs, with ribbon connectors to the front‑panel interface and the disk drive, with the auto‑sensing PSU set snugly on the left‑hand side. There's room aplenty for a 3.5‑inch internal hard‑drive to be mounted, and the HD floppy drive can be swapped out for a 3.5‑inch Syquest removable drive, since the firmware is all there waiting for it. The ESi32 could almost have been a 1U, half‑rack product if Emu had wanted to make it so. However, the 2U decision was, I think, the right one; the 31 ovoid buttons are comfortably spaced and allow dedicated functions (such as multi‑mode/trigger/load and save) rather than reams of menu pages and constant scrolling (try editing a Yamaha TG500 from the front panel sometime!).

Features

On booting, the ESi32 reports the version of the operating system currently in flash EPROM and then gives a readout of the RAM and any boards installed, and proceeds to try and mount any connected hard‑drives if the SCSI board is present. Then the fun begins...

The ESi32 has three basic play modes:
• Single Preset Play
• Multi (timbral) Mode
• Trigger Mode.

Two of them are as you might expect — Preset Mode plays a single 'Preset' or patch, and Multi Mode allows you to put a Preset into any of the 16 available MIDI channel locations, complete with volume and Pan position, for multitimbral sequencing. There are no internal effects to bother with (though the ESi provides for routing its second pair of outputs as a mono send and return to an effects unit if you so wish), so all is pretty straightforward. Trigger Mode is new, a lot of fun, and doesn't even require MIDI, or a keyboard. What is it? Simply a way to map samples onto the 10 trigger keys (similar to the ones on the Akai S01) for triggering manually by button pressing. The interesting aspect of this is that samples can be set to latch or unlatch, so you can set a drum loop going on one key, and then play chords over it with other keys, or add additional loops over the top. It's a sort of polyphonic radio cart machine, where you can press a button, trigger a jingle and lay other parts over it. Simple, yes, but effective for sketching out a few ideas without the need for sequencer or keyboard! Having tried to force the triggers to fall over by some demi‑semi‑quaver jittering on the buttons, and thoroughly entertained myself in the process, I can endorse this feature 1000%. I can see some hip DJs taking an ESi32 along to clubs for some on‑the‑fly triggering. Shame you can only have one set per bank of presets and they can only be applied to Preset number 000 — I want more!!

Voice Architecture

For those unfamiliar with the voice architecture parameter naming of Emu samplers, it's worth comparing the ESi32 to, say, Akai's terminology before discussing how sound is organised on the ESi32.

Emu parlance for sample, by the way, is 'sample' — not wave, oscillator or any other progressively more obscure variation.

Most manufacturers have settled on 'sample' as the basic raw material in their system but, as you organise samples together, terminology changes, though in most cases, the principle is exactly the same. Akai Programs contain keygroups which have four slots for samples, making layering and velocity switching between samples very straightforward. In comparison, the ESi32 has only one slot per 'zone' (which is the nearest equivalent to a keygroup), but a Preset contains two parts — Primary and Secondary layers like Emu's Vintage Keys or Morpheus tone generators. This allows two‑way velocity switching between layers. Presets can also be joined together via 'Linking', which effectively gives you the same ability for four‑way switching or crossfading. The big difference between the Akai/Emu approach is that Akai's keygroup and its associated parameters are linked to a fixed keyboard range, whereas the ESi32, for example, can have a totally different filter/EG/LFO setting on every key of your keyboard, since Emu's Zones are freely assignable to different parameters independent of the actual sample ranges. This type of free zoning is extremely powerful. With Emu's Quick Zone function, you can simply play in the keyboard range you want to edit via MIDI from your keyboard, and then adjust the individual parameter you want to apply to that range, regardless of what other parameter ranges have been set and what sample ranges are covered!

Editing

Editing on the ESi involves two different buttons — Digital Processing or Dynamic Management. The first deals with looping, trimming, normalising and processing samples, and assembling them on the keyboard, and the second with making a finished 'patch' or Preset with envelope and filter/LFO parameters attached. Space doesn't permit a fully detailed account of every single available function in the sample‑editing area, since there are so many; however, I'll highlight a few of the neatest tricks and list the rest. If you have a SCSI hard drive connected to the ESi32, you can turn on 'UNDO', mode, which will always automatically save a backup of your sample to disk before you process it and allow you to immediately undo your actions and restore the original. The ESi32 can also audition samples live off hard disk/CD‑ROM (not floppy) without having to load them into RAM, which is incredibly useful for just checking out the odd few samples which you can't quite remember. Cut, copy and paste of sample regions is also supported (ie. mixing) as well as fade in/out. On the 'synthesis' side, Transform Multiplication (originally from the Emax) allows two samples to be 'multiplied', accentuating common frequencies and removing uncommon frequencies, to create a new sound. It can be fairly time‑consuming and pretty hit or miss, but is certainly a way of creating new sounds.

When a sample has been processed to your heart's content (see DSP features box), you can then 'Place' it into a Zone and start to apply envelopes/velocity sensing/filter control/LFO control under Dynamic Processing. The ESi32 has familiar VCA and VCF sections for both the Primary and Secondary layers of a Preset, with dedicated envelope generators for amplitude and filter control, plus a spare auxiliary envelope that can be routed to control, say, the LFO. The LFO consists of just four basic types, but is vastly enhanced by a delay and variation parameter and an individually controllable 'Send' amount to each of the possible destinations. Velocity can control just about everything you might want, including sample start point, cutoff and attack. It all adds up to comprehensive control over your samples.

For those who need real‑time MIDI control, the ESi again delivers the goods. Under the Preset Definition button, all the real‑time parameters are grouped (including real Portamento), and the Pitch Wheel, Mod Wheel, aftertouch and two other MIDI controllers can be assigned to one of nine destinations, including, perhaps most importantly, the Filter Cutoff and Attack.

Expandability

The ESi32 is far more modular than any previous Emu sampler design, making possible a wide range of configurations at different price points. Rather than including features such as SCSI and digital I/O as standard (as on previous Emu samplers), these features are available as add‑on boards, which enables you to start small (and cheap) and build upwards. The basic version of the ESi comes with a high‑density 1.4Mb floppy drive, 2Mb RAM , no SCSI, no digital I/O. The RAM used is now the 30‑pin, 70ns, SIMM boards which will be familiar to Macintosh users, as opposed to the more expensive ZIP RAM used in the older EIIIX racks. However, there are only two internal SIMM slots, which have to contain the same size board, so the available options are 2Mb (2 x 1Mb SIMMs), 8Mb (2 x 4Mb SIMMs), 16Mb (2 x 8Mb SIMMs) or 32Mb (2 x 16Mb SIMMs). This does mean, unfortunately, that you have to decide how far you want to upgrade well in advance, or, for example, be prepared to get rid of both your 4Mbyte boards when you decide you want 8Mbyte ones. Recent Macs let you mix and match RAM board sizes and this would have been a better option.

The SCSI and digital I/O boards fit into the two empty slots on the rear of the ESi32. The review model had only the SCSI board fitted, which includes a single 50‑way connector like the Akai S1000 board. This was tested with an Apple CD300 CD‑ROM drive and worked perfectly, even allowing samples to be auditioned direct from disk. However, I had less joy with a 128Mb Magneto‑Optical drive which had worked perfectly with the EIIIX. Unfortunately, since we had access to a an ESi32 for such a short time, I had to leave this matter unresolved. As always with samplers, the lesson is: check with the manufacturer for a full drive compatibility list. The ESi32 is set up with SCSI arbitration firmware, which is supposed to allow two ESis to share the same drive and act as a single 64‑note‑polyphonic system using MIDI overflow mode (according to the spec). However, you'll have to take Emu's word on that for now, since we only had access to one unit. Transfer of samples via SCSI (using the SMDI protocol) to sound‑design software is mentioned, but is not, as yet, implemented.

The digital I/O board was not available for this review but is specified as having SPDIF In/Out on RCA (phono) connectors, and will support 48, 44.1, and 32kHz sample rates. Digital outputs vary in quality and some can be quite fizzy, so we'll have to wait before we can pass judgement on this one. Also, as far as I can tell, Emu has no plans to support the DAT streaming technique, which allows you to dump data digitally to a DAT machine via the digital I/O, like the Akai digital board. Both boards are expected to retail between £175 and £200, which is a little more than some companies, but may well come down if third‑party companies start taking an interest in the ESi, as they did with the S1000. A CRT board like Roland's and extra outputs seems impossible, though they said that about the prospect of making the DX7 multitimbral, and Grey Matter found a way!

ESI32 Versus The Rest

Despite a few early software niggles on the file management side (which Emu are aware of and set to improve), with this specification at this price point the ESi32 looks like being a world beater, coming in mid‑way between the Akai S01 at the sub‑£1000 mark and the Roland S760 at around £1600. Akai have got wind of this, and (understandably) are reducing prices across their range (particularly on the S2800) to try and even things out, which will delight musicians. Aside from all the pricing issues, perhaps the other key considerations are raw polyphony power, compatibility and editing/ease of use. The ESi32 compares favourably, with its 32‑voice polyphony, against Roland's 24‑voice, but if you are a fan of graphic/CRT displays, the ESi32 may not satisfy your visual desires in the same way as Roland's samplers. If and when it is implemented (Emu say it will be), the scrub‑editing facility on the ESi will reduce the need for a visual wave display, though some may hanker after waveforms in the looping page.

From a feature/sound point of view, there seems little compelling reason for buying, say, an S01, with the ESi32 hovering just above a grand, unless you absolutely must have Akai's key‑group way of working or Akai floppy‑disk compatibility, which the ESi lacks. But considering that the ESi is in its first software version, it was well behaved whilst in my company, and already has a feature set to be proud of.

Summary

An Emulator for not much more than a grand — it can't be, can it? Well, maybe the ESi32 is not an Emulator by name, but an Emulator by nature it certainly is. In fact, the ESi32 is essentially 75% of an Emulator EIIIXS for 25% of the original retail price, and ought to be forwarded to Des Lynam for the How Do They Do That? treatment! At £1199, the ESi really does stand apart from all else in terms of power for your pound, and really sets a new standard for samplers at this level. It looks slick, operates well (despite having no LCD graphics), has a positively obese feature list, the best resonant digital filters (outside the EIIIX and E4) and an absurdly high testosterone level in the sound department. The bundled sounds show off the machine well and yes, are genuinely usable, and that oft‑dismissed but essential item, the manual, has clear explanations, tutorials and real world troubleshooting. I can already hear the sounds for the next set of ESi disks: the pleading voices of musicians in loan establishments, the rattling of tills in the music retail world, and the satisfied sighs and chinking of glasses in Malones bar, Santa Cruz. The Emu has landed.