medway wrote:But to get that nice 12bit sound you do need the converters of the old stuff. Software bit reduction is only going to sound so good regardless of whether its an effect or actually a 12bit sample. That being said you should be able to just zero out the last 4 bits of a 16bit sample to get the effect. Either that or just sample your sound 24db below 0 on the mpc and then normalize. Thats basically the same as only using 12 bits since each bit is 6db.
All this is why I still keep my old samplers around 
i quite agree with you that you need the actual converters to get the true sound.
didn't think of the knock 4 bits off trick, but even so nomalizing is going to lose any 12bittedness the sample has anyway, so i wouldn't worry about it. having said that, if you master to 16 bit, it's going to be mucked up whatever, so i guess you are right. i think too much sometimes. grrr back to topic.....