Conference napalm::commusic_v1

1393.0. "Roland S330 Rackmount Sampler" by BOLT::BAILEY (Steph Bailey) Tue May 17 1988 18:45

    I played with an S-330 for an hour or so this past weekend.
    
    If you like the S-50, you'll love the S-330.  (Unless your favorite
    feature of the S-50 is the hard-disk interface).
    
    It is basically an S-550 with half the memory (and the S-550 is
    basically a module version of the S-50 with a real-time filter and
    twice the memory--these Roland products are getting out of hand,
    since everything is ``almost'' compatible)
    
    Briefly, it provides you the sonic capabilities of an S-50--16 voices,
    8 part multitimbrality, 8 individual outs, nifty, mouse-driven visual
    editing with an external monitor, samples stored on 3.5" floppy--all in
    a single height rack mount unit, for $1600  (List price is $2000, but
    Pianos 'N Stuff had it for $1604)!
    
    The memory is unexpandable, and there is no SCSI port for a hard disk. 
    
    It can read and write S50 and S550 disks, as well as its own
    (different) format.
    
    A 24000 note sequencer will be availible at some point.  An interesting
    point is that the sequencer canibalizes operation system code memory
    for its note storage, so those 24000 notes come at no loss of
    sample/tone memory.  On the flip side, this means that all the sounds
    (tones, patches, whatever the hell they are called this week) are
    read-only when the sequencer is in use.
    
    All in all, the sucker is no great departure from the other Roland
    samplers, but the ergonomics and price have taken what seems like
    a quantum leap.
    
    Steph