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Steal Of The Century | |
Akai S01 16-bit SamplerArticle from Recording Musician, December 1992 |
At last, a sampler that's affordable, expandable and approachable.
OK, there's a recession on - but can you really afford not to read about a machine that pushes back the frontier of low-cost sampling? Paul White thinks not... Additional research by Derek Johnson.
Once a sample has been recorded, any unwanted silence can be trimmed off the front to make sure it starts instantly, and looping is implemented to create long sustained sounds. It is also possible to play samples backwards by swapping the start and end points. Only samples with a relatively constant level will loop neatly and some trial and error is required to get a clean loop, especially as the LED display is far too coarse to rely on when setting loop or trim points. However, even with my S950, I have to fine-tune loops by ear, and the S01 can produce very high-quality loops with only a little perseverance. Rapidly decaying sounds can also be played without loops; a Mono triggering option enables samples to be cut off when retriggered, for break-beat effects or fast drum fills which might otherwise exceed the polyphony of the unit.
Individual sample banks may be saved to disk, but it is easier to save the entire memory in one go in the form of an All file. Even with a fully expanded memory, the entire memory should fit onto a single HD disk, and with a standard machine, you should get two or more All files on one HD disk. There is no way of naming the files but they are automatically numbered as they are put onto disk; some form of personal labelling is mandatory if chaos is to be avoided. Good news is that Akai are already putting together a sample library for this machine which users may access free of charge, while samples (samples only — not program information) can also be read from existing S900, S950, S1000 and S1100 disks. In the case of the S900 and S950 disks, the sample resolution remains at 12-bit - we tried some samples from a friend's S900 library and found that they were read by the S01, though needed work on end and loop points. Because of the fixed sample rate of the S01, many samples from other machines will need transposing after loading, but a table at the back of the manual helps in this. In practice, some of the samples loaded in this way need a little work, as you occasionally get a bit of noise or corruption after the sample which needs to be trimmed off. This may be caused by the slightly different looping arrangements of the various machines.
And talking of looping, one of my gripes, which also extends to the more costly Akai samplers, is that the Loop and trim points are always shown in actual samples, which means that you have to get out your calculator to find out how that equates to elapsed time. If anyone at Akai is listening, let's have the option of working in milliseconds please!
Other features include the ability to select keyboard ranges for the various samples, pitch transposing and tuning, bend range and so forth, but one important thing that is missing is any form of vibrato LFO. This might not seem a big deal, but I know from experience that vibrato, particularly delayed vibrato, is exceedingly useful in disguising less than perfect loops in sounds like strings and choirs.
Despite the simplified operating system, the S01 can cope with the majority of sampling jobs without the compromises showing too much. It has enough memory to allow it to sample wholesale chunks of sound or music, while the looping facilities make it useful as a musical instrument. Some people will bemoan the fact that there is only one output, or that you can only change the release time of a sample, but for me, the lack of a delay vibrato facility was more serious.
Tonally, the sound is both clean and warm, though the sound quality does start to suffer if a sample is played more than an octave or so below its original pitch. You would expect a sample to sound a trifle 'crunchy' when played back at a significantly lower pitch than the original, but because dropping the pitch presumably involves dropping the sample rate, aliasing effects start to become evident in the form of non-harmonically related distortion, which get worse the more you drop the pitch. However, don't get this out of proportion — by being sensible in choosing what note to sample in the first place, most such nasties can be avoided, unless you actually want to use them for artistic reasons.
Operationally, the machine is very logical and straightforward to use and the only thing which requires any mental effort or perseverance on behalf of the user is setting up the best trim and loop points. There's even a selection of sample disks included with the machine to get you started.
With a full list price of less than £700, any compromises made in the design of the S01 have to be seen in the context of what else is available for the price. The old S700 cost a similar amount of money yet had a limited sample time, giving a maximum of something like two seconds at anything like a usable audio bandwidth, as opposed to the 15+ seconds you get from an unexpanded S01 at a very respectable 15kHz or so bandwidth. This is a mono sampler, and I for one can live with the single mono output. As for the lack of any envelope controls other than release time, that's fine — most of the time that's all I use on my S950. I do, however, find the lack of any vibrato facilities more frustrating and I would have liked to have some form of user-tweakable cross-fade looping, even if only in the form of an add-on circuit board, as was the case with the S700/X7000. It would also have been nice to be able to halve the sampling rate for those occasions where full bandwidth is less important than overall sampling time. Indeed, many of the features omitted rely on software rather than hardware and I have a feeling that what was left in and what was taken out was as much a matter of marketing strategy as it was of technical practicality.
The expandability of the S01 is excellent for a machine of this price, while the ability to pillage samples from other Akai formats (albeit involving a little effort on behalf of the user) is sure to be a big bonus as far as sales are concerned. Another plus point is the fact that the machine can use HD disks as well as DD; HDs can hold up to 1.44Mbytes of data which is almost three time the memory of an unexpanded S01 (500kbytes).
In some ways, the S01 is the ideal budget machine for dance music production because it is simple to use, has adequate memory and the facilities that have been omitted are the ones least used in these applications anyway. On the other hand, the machine is also capable of excellent musical results so long as you don't expect it to do anything too sophisticated, while the generally good audio performance should secure it a place in many professional audio and broadcast facilities as well as home studios. Finally, affordable sampling actually does mean affordable!
Further Information
Akai S01 £699; EXM001 upgrade (doubles sample time), £79. Prices include VAT.
Sampling system | 16-bit linear |
Sampling frequency | 32kHz (fixed) |
Sampling Time | 15.625 seconds (expandable to 31.25 with EXM001 upgrade) |
Polyphony | 8-note |
Multitimbrality | 8-part |
Internal memory | 1MB |
Data Storage | 3.5-inch MF 2DD/2HD disk drive |
EDIT PARAMETERS:
TRIM | Start Point, Start Fine, End Point, End Fine. |
LOOP | Loop/one shot. Mono Trigger, Loop Point, Loop Fine. |
LEVEL | Level, Release, Velocity. |
PITCH | Transpose, Sample Tune, Constant Pitch, Bend. |
MIDI | Key Range High, Key Range Low, Program Number, Channel. |
SET UP | MIDI Transpose, Master Tune, Program Channel Change. |
DISK | Load, Save, Delete, Format. |
PRICE | £699. |
Akai UK, (Contact Details).
Akai S01 Sampler
(MT Nov 92)
Sampling Democracy - Akai S01 Sampler
(SOS Nov 92)
Browse category: Sampler > Akai
Review by Paul White, Derek Johnson
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