Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1998 22:48:04 +0100
From: "Christian [iso-8859-1] Vestb=F8" <4-lom@online.no>
To: digitalhell@resrocket.com
Cc: static@headcleaner.com
Subject: Re: [Digital_Hell] ASR-X vs MPC2000

A few words about the MPC2000:
It is a drum/phrase sampler and midi sequencer, quite different from a
standard rackmount sampler, with the MPC you can't layer a sound over a few
octaves and play it from a midi keyboard, for example.

The FX are ok, very useable and thoroughly integrated in the OS. No midi
control, though (exept one parameter in one of the effects...) If you go
for the MPC, you should get the FX and outputs boards. The sequencer is
great, and the timing is, uh, unbeatable :) Both outputs send midi sync, to=
o.
The editing is very basic, it doesn't even have normalise, and it's not,
and won't be supported by ReCycle. (I use WaveSurgeon.)
IMO it sound boring, far too clean, but then I prefer the sound of 8 and 12
bit samplers, so you might disagree. It can only record 44.1 Khz, but will
play 22 and 11.
The 12db resonant LP filters are just about useless as a creative tool.
They aren't realtime - the sound always play at the filter setting it had
when triggered, if you tweak it while a sound is playing, the change will
occur the next time the sound triggers.

There are a few annoying bugs, but you'll learn to work around them. It
won't, for example, play short sound files properly (about 4k or less), but
if you copy and paste a few k's of silence at the end, it plays ok. I
always set my sounds with a decay of 2, otherwise you will often get
annoying clicks.

I've never used the ASR-X, when I bought my MPC2k I didn't even consider
it, it seems far too MC-303-ish to me. For what it's worth, the MPC2k seems
to be the choice of the professional, I've seen a MPC2000 in a lot of
setups, but I've only heard of a single band who uses the ASR-X. This may
be because of Akai's reputation, though.

The reasons why I bought mine was to get away from computer based
sequencers, and because I wanted to do some instrumental hip-hop. It's not
very good at processing sound, if that's what you want to do you shouldn't
sell your esi.
I use external processing myself.

^_^ Christian