Should I buy? Yamaha A5000, cheap

[Thomas Klepl]

Hello folks.. music store in my area is having a sale and they apparently have new Yamaha A5000 samplers for $1099 CAD (about $650 US). I don't have a sampler at all right now, and my synth gear consists of a QS7 and a Proteus 2000. What do you think? I don't have any experience with samplers but I can see adding one to my studio at some point. I don't want to let the price fool me if, say, EMU is a far better choice of sampler.

 

Thanks

[Rod S]

Are they bundling a few sample cd's with it? What you have to keep in mind with samplers is that it's a significant money commitment, unless you are planning to just use your own sounds. Sample libraries start at around $100.

 

I'm not too sure about the yamahas, but most samplers come with limited memory (a lot times only 2 megs), and only a floppy for storage; so before you know it, your spending money with a cd-rom drive to read sample libraries, a hard drive to store samples (or some sort of removable media) and more memory. Loading samples from floppies is an option but is soooo tedious.

 

I remember that they were some problems also interfacing the A series to either a Mac or a PC through SCSI... check it out. Weren't the Yamahas notorious for slow SCSI too? They might have fixed it in these samplers, though.

 

As far as samplers though, I think they are good bang for the buck, more so that the emu esi series. I'm not familiar with the akais or rolands.

 

That being said, I have an esi32 I'm selling, contact me directly if you're interested. (Nah, I was reall trying to help, not advertise. I just thought of that http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/smile.gif )

[Sergievsky]

I think that is an incredible deal and you should buy it. I was deciding between that and an Emu E5000, but I bought the E5000 because I wanted to be able to burn some ROMs for my Proteus 2000 in the future. But with the price that low on the Yamahas I definitely would have gone that route. They should come with a 9 cdrom library (the E5k only had 2). I have heard of the slow SCSI, but I used to own a Yamaha TX16w (one of 6 people I think in the world who bought one) and the FLOPPY was incredibly slow, so I'm not going to complain. The polyphony is twice that of the E5000, and you can burn cdroms right from the sampler. So I really don't see how you can lose for $650. But that said, I'm happy with my Emu. Let us know how it goes. Maybe I'll get one too. http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/smile.gif

 

Raul

[Thomas Klepl]

Well, I bought the A5000. I don't regret the purchase one bit. It was indeed just $1099 CAD, including 9 sample CDs which are for the most part very usable.

 

I spent about 3 hours last night recording and building a kalimba program from scratch, starting with recording actual kalimba notes at different velocities. It was a breeze to put it together which surprised me considering I've never owned a sampler.

 

The interface is very logically laid out and the huge screen is a amazing compared to my QS7 and Proteus2000, both of which have small 2-line displays.

 

I had the unit loaded with 128 megs of memory (the A5000's maximum capacity) and managed to do this at no cost which made the deal that much better.

 

I had a spare 1 gig IDE hard drive which I installed immediately, and I also purchased a SCSI Cable that allows me to not only transfer samples back and forth from the computer, but also allows me to access my SCSI CD-ROM drive in the computer from the sampler!

 

My only complaint is that the load speed through SCSI is pretty slow. IDE hard disk speed is as expected though, so that's good.

 

Having strictly used ROMplers for years, the sampler is a breath of fresh air and I plan on making full use of it in future recordings.