SO WHO WANTS to record a window? A surprising number of people as it turns out, and once the world gets to understand the MDB's purpose in life and stop making silly jokes about its rather eccentric name, it's probably going to become a big favourite in professional studios.

The price alone suggests the "professional" bit, but the specification makes the MDB of interest to recording enthusiasts at any level. We're talking, as if you hadn't already guessed, about sampling, in this case monophonically but with astonishingly high quality. If the MDB could record for half an hour you could replay a Compact Disc sampled into it and not be able to tell the difference.

Still, the MDB seems expensive for a monophonic unit, until you look at what's being done in pro studios around the world every day of the week. The most popular monophonic sampler doesn't come from E-Mu or Fairlight or Greengate, but from that little-known effects company AMS. That's right — the Swiss manufacturers of the MDB are cashing in on the assumption that there are lots of people out there who can afford to buy an AMS digital delay and only use it for sound sampling.

Whether this assumption is justified could be the subject of an interesting little questionnaire ("do you really have enough money to buy an AMS just for sampling? Could you send some of it to us?") but what is certain is that an AMS unit capable of, say, six seconds of sampling costs over five thousand pounds. The basic MDB available now offers you six seconds for just £2750, and this unit can be expanded to give 24 second sampling. The 12 second unit which will be the major production model costs £3150 and can be expanded to give up to 48 seconds of sampling, still with 16-bit linear Compact Disc quality.

So where does the window come in? Quite simply, it's a horizontal LED ladder on the front panel of the machine (which is a one unit high, standard rack mounting design) which steps along as a sample is played or recorded to show you exactly where in the sound you are. Hardly vital when you're just bashing out the slap bass imitations, but useful if you want to edit and modify your sounds, as we'll describe later.

At either end of the MDB's window is a black button with an integral LED. Hitting one of these decides which end of the sample you're working from when editing, which is handy because the slowest editing speed is very very slow indeed and would probably take all day just to play through one short sample. It makes your average bass drum sound like what the Californians would call a whole microcosmic auditory landscape experience, and certainly allows very precise location of start and end points — down to 0.2 mS in fact. Hit the start or end window and the Play button once and this is what you hear; hit Play again and the sample speeds a little, then a little more, until after six sharp presses you're up to normal speed. Then just hit the window button again to edit your sound at whatever point you've reached.

But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, because we haven't explained how a sound sample gets into the machine in the first place. The audio input is an XLR, and any sound will trigger the sampler from Ready Mode at a level of around -3 on the input LED scale. The input has a High and Low impedance switch adjacent to it for level matching. As the sample's recorded, the LED window steps along, and as we've seen you can edit a sound quite easily once it's digitised. It's also possible to overdub sounds — instead of hitting Record you simply hit Overdub and the sounds are layered over each other. You can repeat this process many times (twenty or thirty times, it's claimed) and so come up with very complex layered samples. But of course, if you hit Overdub accidentally while there's no music input, your original sample will lose a little quality.

So what can you do with your sample once it's in captivity? Well, first you can tune it using the right hand Tune control, which gives a range of plus or minus one octave. Then you can trigger the sample with a pulse applied to a rear panel socket, and control its pitch via a one volt per octave CV input. Either a +5V or -5V gate will do to trigger the sample.

Even more interestingly, the rear panel has a MIDI In socket which allows the same plus or minus one octave control of the sample. The MDB's MIDI responds dynamically too, so you could use a DX7 (or a MIDI sequencer such as Roland's MSQ 700) to play the sample with varying dynamics. This really takes the MDB into the realms of MIDI sequencing and linkage denied to the AMS unit as it stands.

The rear panel also features a computer interface socket which will allow you to connect the MDB to a dedicated disc drive. Of course, the AMS and the basic MDB forget everything you've carefully fed into them as soon as they're turned off, so the disc drive is a real luxury. The only machine currently on the market which stores a sound while switched off is Vesta's DIG 410 Sampler/Delay; that's much cheaper than the MDB but doesn't offer such wonderful sound quality or editing facilities.

The MDB's disc drive unit is expected to cost around £500 and is due in August, as are stocks of the 12 second Window Recorder and the announcement of a MIDI Poly Mode update to the machine. At the moment it simply responds to any and all channels in MIDI Omni mode, so you'd have to use a MIDI channel filter such as one of Roland's if you wanted the MDB to respond only to information coming in on one MIDI channel.

More advanced applications of the MDB partly depend on the imagination of the user. You can make a sound repeat endlessly in Hold Mode and play it backwards if desired. You can also use the window to edit out and replace sections of a sample, and with the 48 second version this could even extend to re-arranging lines or whole verses in a song. The thing's going to be wonderful for playing about with advertising jingles. The update for 12 second models to 48 second sampling is expected in November and should cost around £600; beware, if thou shouldst buy a 6 second model, for it cannot be expanded past ye limit of 12 seconds. Thou hast been warned.

On the whole I was impressed by the MDB. I'd have been even more impressed if it had a disc drive thrown in and did 12 or even 48 second sampling for the same price — then a lot of people would be flogging their mono-sampling Synclaviers at a massive loss. But I suppose memory capacity and 16-bit linear conversion à la Compact Disc both come expensive, and not even the conscientious Swiss can do anything about that.

MDB Window Recorder: £2750

CONTACT: Syco Systems, (Contact Details).