E-mu Emulator and the first samplers, from floppy disk to 16-bit

What a sampler does

A sampler records sounds and plays them back from a keyboard or another trigger. One recording can be shifted in pitch to play scales and chords, so a single violin note can cover several keys. Each recording is mapped to a range of keys called a keyzone; the set of zones is a keymap. A short sample can be looped — a section repeated between two points — so it sustains as long as the key is held, and a loop crossfade hides the join.

Before digital samplers, keyboards such as the Mellotron played sounds recorded on tape. The first digital sampling was done around 1969 on a minicomputer system at a London studio. The first commercially available sampling synthesizer, the Computer Music Melodian, appeared in 1976, and the Fairlight CMI of 1979 was the first polyphonic digital sampling synthesizer — recording at 8-bit depth and 8 to 24 kHz, and starting at about US$30,000.

The Emulator (1981): sampling on a floppy disk

E-mu Systems was founded in 1971 to make microprocessor chips, digital scanning keyboards and other components; its keyboard design was used in the Prophet-5. In 1979 its founders saw the Fairlight CMI and the Linn LM-1 drum machine at a convention and set out to build a cheaper sampling keyboard. They first considered selling the design to Sequential Circuits, but when Sequential stopped paying royalties for the keyboard, E-mu released the Emulator itself in 1981.

The Emulator sampled sounds, saved them to 5¼-inch floppy disks and played them from the keyboard, so owners could build a library disk by disk, share it or buy ready-made sound disks. It was a basic eight-bit sampler with a simple filter and a single loop, and the first units had no amplifier envelope. It came as a two-voice model (only one sold), a four-voice and an eight-voice model. The keyboard was split, with one sample on each half; to play one sound across the whole keyboard, the same sound had to be loaded into both sides. About 500 were sold before it was discontinued in early 1984.

Emulator II (1984): the eight-bit classic

Despite its price, the Emulator II was considered good value next to the Fairlight CMI Series II, whose basic model cost US$30,000. Its companding converters, variable sample rate and analog filter stages give it a sound of its own, which is why its eight-bit samples are still sought out — and why it was heard on many film scores of the 1980s.

Emulator III and the EIV: 16-bit and beyond

The Emulator III followed in 1987 and was made until 1991, with a rack version from 1988. It held 4 or 8 MB and stored 16-bit, 44 kHz stereo samples, the quality of the most advanced professional equipment of the day, with quieter outputs and more reliable CEM filter chips. But it cost US$12,695 (4 MB) or US$15,195 (8 MB) when Akai, Ensoniq and Casio were selling samplers for under US$2,000, and it sold far less well than its predecessors.

The Emulator IV series (1994) introduced the Emulator Operating System (EOS): a rack sampler with 128 voices and up to 128 MB of memory. Variants followed — the e64 (1995), the E4K keyboard (1996), the E4X Turbo (1997) and the E-Synth with sound ROMs — and the final Ultra models of 1999 culminated in the E4 Platinum. The series was discontinued in 2002.

The Emulator among other early samplers

Working with a vintage sampler

1. Copy the disks first. A vintage sampler's sounds live on floppy disks or a small hard drive; work from copies so an ageing disk or drive cannot take the only original with it.
2. Count the memory. Memory was the main limit. Sampling one piano note on every few keys at several loudness levels quickly runs into megabytes, which is why early samplers relied on short, looped samples and lower sample rates.
3. Check the keyboard split. An original Emulator holds one sample per half of the keyboard; plan the mapping before the session.
4. Sync over MIDI. The Emulator II and later models have MIDI; the original does not.