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Roland S-10  

This was my first sampler, In spite of its short comings I managed to have hours of fun with it and made many recordings and gigged with it. It has a quick disk for its secondary storage. Quick disks are like the normal floppy disks but smaller. They are fast but you have to juggle up to 4 disk insertions to load all of  the memory. It took me a little while to get the right disks in and loaded before the next song starts. The quick disks break down after about 10 years and repairing them can be a frustrating experience.

Relations

Cheaper version of the S-50, S-550, S-330 a keyboard version of the S-220.

Pro

• Can be triggered from an external controller eg an electronic drum pad.

• Easy to operate. I have used it for real time live sampling.

• Great for low tech sample sounds (its the only tech it can do).

• Supports a few different sampling rates.

Con

• The quick disk drives, are like prostate cancer, its only a matter of time before they give the sampler lots of problems.

• Getting samples in and out though midi has is prohibitively slow at 15 minutes.

• Parts are as rare as roosters eggs and reconditioning costs many times the price of the device.

• The sample quality (12bit) is limited.

• The memory is limited (I think its about 4 seconds).

• There are no SCSI expansion possibilities.

• No memory expansion possible.