By mr_debauch
Wed Jun 17, 2026 12:43 am
and don't forget to emulate how samples sound better when loading from DD Floppy disks
MPC-Live/Remix16
johnnytravels wrote:I get what you’re saying, but I think there’s a difference between aged electronic and general characteristics of a machine that were formative of style.
The woowoowoo of the non-resonant S950 filter for 90s boombap basslines, the graininess of the s1000 time stretch for jungle and DnB and so on.
I think people who want these emulations are not necessarily asking for perfectly accurate characteristics but to the point that the style and texture of the music once dependent on these characteristics can easily be reproduced.
For me it’s a very practical question too: I can record a whole bunch of samples loud into an sp1200, mpc3000 or even 2000xl and the sounds all glue together without any fx. I can’t do that with a live 3 and this is something that’s missing. The MPC sample advertises an oldschool workflow which is cool, but everything still needs a bunch of external post-processing to fit together organically. I’d rather the new boxes didn’t need this.
That's actually a much more reasonable argument than the one I was making fun of.
I can understand wanting access to certain workflows and textures. Things like the SP1200 drive, the MPC3000 running hot and "gluing" samples together, or the rougher timestretch and pitch behavior of older samplers absolutely did shape records people love. And the point about the Live 3 needing post-processing to get things to sit together is fair. That's a real workflow difference, not mythology.
Where I start to question things is how much mythology gets built on top of that. Take the S950 filter. The internet talks about it like it's some kind of secret ingredient Akai accidentally bottled. I own and have owned a lot of S series samplers, including the S950, and honestly it's just a perfectly decent low-pass filter. Nothing mystical about it. I've always preferred the S900 anyway, especially the way it handles transposition. If I'm being honest my preference there goes to E-mu. I like ring modulation and the way the low end stays intact when transposing. The Ensoniq EPS does something similar but that's a whole other conversation. And unless I'm mistaken, with the OS 4.0 disk the S900 gets access to similar filtering behavior anyway, which makes some of the S950 obsession even harder to pin down.
In general, I've always found the S-series fairly clean sounding. If anything I preferred the character of Ensoniq samplers, but that's a separate rabbit hole.
In reality, those records were the result of an entire chain. Gain staging, clipping, console EQ, compression, tape, mixing decisions, mastering. The sampler is just one stage in that process, not the final sound. And a lot of the "glue" people associate with older machines often comes down to workflow and limitations more than some built-in sonic magic. You sample hotter, you commit earlier, you work differently because you have to. That's also where I think the conversation splits between the sound of the gear itself and the workflow and context it existed in. Those get blurred together and that's where a lot of the mythology comes from.
Back then, the real equalizer was access. Who could afford an MPC, an S950, studio time, records, and everything else needed to operate in that environment. Today, access is mostly solved. You can get extremely close to those workflows with modern tools. So the bottleneck has shifted. It's no longer about what you can get your hands on. It's about what you do with it. Creativity. Taste. Arrangement. Discipline. Decision making. That's why I think a lot of producers end up romanticizing the gear itself. It's easier to focus on equipment than on the far less tangible parts of making records.
Even if you handed someone the exact same setup used on a classic record, the sampler, mixer, studio, and samples, the outcome still wouldn't be the same. Because the gear wasn't the determining factor. The context, experience, and decisions were.
I just don't think the absence of a perfectly modeled S950 filter or vintage behavior is what stands between most people and the sound they're trying to achieve.
