Pete Rock a 16-bit sell out.....

props on the beats drumatic. im a have to side with the cat whos drums sound real as apposed to real fuktup. its about how sh it knocks man.

i didnt know cats were siding about 12 bit sampling. Dorks. Drumatic got some dope beats casue he got skills. Not casue of his mpc. u give him a 2000xl or fruity loops and i bet he will still make tight beats.

im sidin with his beat tactics over the cat who perfers over compression. trust me man i care more about the final product than the machine used to make it. bitrate never made a wak beat hot.

It's very simple:

12-bit samples have a more robust sound to them. Drums sound fuller, melodies wound wider.

I have an MPC 2000 here that i'm selling. I booted it up and made a beat on it last night. Admitally, the machine is solid. It can do a great number of things and it does them well. However, in terms of sound, everything I sampled sound dead too me. My Sp-1200 makes samples come alive.. until you've USED an Sp, you won't understand what I'm saying. Regardless, the MPC sound characteristic can best be described like this;

I sampled a snare drum that I consider to be "gritty".. It was from a Cadet 45. When I captured this on the Sp, it smacked, and when I pitched it down, it got a nice tin-can sound. Now this same snare on the 2000, sounded completely different. It had some tin-can action going on once I boosted the resonance, however, it sounded super flat! What I realized is that the MPC 16-bit series samplers (and all 16-bit samplers), seem to have this dry room sound. It sounds like you mic'd a snare drame in a booth with acoustical foam 360 desgrees around it. What i'm saying is, the sample captured is very accurate, almost unrealistically accurate, and as a result, it comes out with more high end (brightness) then low end because the acoustics sorta die. EQ, and the proper recording could bring that MPC snare sample back to life from it's initally dead quality, but the SP needed no real enhancement right off that bat.

What this all means is, typically people in the pro audio community judge a peice of musical equipment by it's quality. It's quality is typically determined by how easy it is to get the "right sound" with minimal processing. In the case of the Sp, additional processing only makes it sound 10x better. Where as additional processing on the MPC only makes the sound 5x better. You get my point? The Sp sample sounded better from jump. This is not a preference thing ether, i'm speaking pure.. in a non-bias frame of mind.

And to prove that, I will say that thier is nothing wrong with 16-bit samplers (as I have said before). They can be processed to have a nice full sound, it just takes more work to achieve that sound then a 12-bit sampler which possess that feel immediately.

I could get more detailed about this, but i'm lazy right now. You get the point.

Hahahaha, this is some funny sh!t!!!! Who cares what you use, as long as it's bangin' I don't give a fu@k!!! To much nerd talk and fu@k grimey. I sent years with equipment (mirage, eps, sp1200) that did it's job BUT thats stuff is in my attic now. I'm never going back to that. You'll are crazy!!! Just make hot sh!t, isn't that the point anyways to make good music. And Pete still got some hot sh!t... more than whoever made that comment.

^Take those 12-bit smaplers out of your attic and PM me. I'll buy the SP-1200 off you.

Lo Pass Filter wrote:^You'll never see an SP-1200 re-release like you did in 97' because market statistics show people aren't willing to pay more then $2,000 for a drum machine sampler any more. And what people are, don't make up enough of the buying demographics to make it worth while finacially for a company like E-mu to do.

And it is a damn shame too. I do think there could be a market for PCI/Firewire type interfaces. That would keep the costs down (<$500) and at the same time keep the sound characteristics of a hardware device. It would be cool to be able to buy a S950 or SP1200 on a PCI card.

^You should try pitchen that to E-mu - ha. They will respond with a big fu*kin NO like they do with anything SP-1200 related.

Nah I think Avid could do it though. They have the experts to pull it off. They have M-Audio and Digidesign teams in their camp now.

Back to Pete Rock though... I like the work he did on Surviving Elements/SS2.

pete rock is soft like pillow.

See, people like to confuse the issue by saying as long as it's banging it doesn't matter. You either discuss this as a listener or as a musician, Musicians use equipment and prefer some over others. A listener might not care what guitar the guitarists uses, but that guitarists knows if the neck is too thick because he'll get blisters where he never has before. The song will sound the same, but the experience of playing is different. That is how you discuss these things, as samplists, you interface with your equipment, some pople prefer mice and apples, other's prefer new uber samplers, some prefer the old stuff. This is a forum for the old stuff, the 3000 and 60 are OLD, hell, even the 2000 is gettin old, but it's got it's own forum.

THe old stuff that we are using is when samplers were still an exciting market, and people built them as instruments for musicians, like stradivari did for violins. They had their own approaches, delivered different things, and broke molds to do it. There is still some of that in these machines, you can feel the passion that people put into it because it went into the details, they listened to the sound, they wanted samples taken to sound alive.

Hell, Dave Rossum at emu invented SSM filter Chips, the first analog filter on a chip EVER!! Made all sorts of analog synths possible (the Prophet 5 used them in the early revs, lots of the Korg stuff too) as well as the filters in the SP's and Emax's possible. We're talking about the legends that invented this technology. After they left the game, most manufacturers just went with adding more of the same features to what was already invented, and cutting out what could make them an extra buck, they had a blue print and they stuck to it. Even some 16 bit samplers have that, the Ensoniq stuff is rediculous, I don;t think there is another sampler out there that can do everything it does. They may do more, but they leave a lot of cool stuff out.

I know many MPC users who left the 2000 because of what Lo Pass is talking about, flat sounding sample, you record it and it sounds like the record only tamer, flatter, less bass. They didn't go to 12 bit, but they went to things that added some character to the sample, that enhance it as Lo Pass put it. Enhance is a good word for it, it just brings out certain qualities that you can't help but find pleasing. Now if you want really clean cymbals then you'll have to do a little work on your levels and even then it isn;t gonna be clean. But kicks and snares? forget it. Strings, phrases? 12 bit just grabs it.

An example, Dave Smith when they were making the Prophet VS, heard the sounds and was just loving it, a bit later he was messing with the prototype and it dodn't sound as good anymore, he was like "What did you guys do??" they had just added the anti aliasing filter (the VS wavetable is 12 bit) and he said, take that shyt off, it sounds better without it.

Now technically, fidelity wise, everything has an antialias filter and it needs it, but when a good ear hears that it sounds better without it than with it, he doesn't let popular conventions overrule his ears.

Now the 60 has a good sound, punchy, quite clean for a 12 bit machine, the Emu stuff just clobbers it though, the sound of it just eats it for breakfast, but the 60 still delivers, especially with 3.10, editing, sampling on it and the whole design is a step beyond. But strictly on sound? The Emu has that passion, that enhancement that is more extreme than the 60. I think the fixed sample rate is at fault. Fixed at 40kHz, the 60 is quite clean unless you distort the input. When you do that compression thing it's crazy though, I think the rate is halved to 20k or something. Whoa.

Lo Pass really knows his shyt, I was not gonna mention that you can really hear what 12 bit can do when you pitch down, it is another world.

but if you want what you sample to sound just like the record, and you don't want your machine to give back to you more than what you give it, it doesn't matter. But how many of you are arguing against all this without ever having used this gear, without having had the opportunity to sample into it and mess with it well? Again, we are not talking about music, we are talking about making music, the experience of using gear, you may like what you have, which is really cool, I should hope you do, but when you get to try a bunch of different machines you start to see some subtleties that others don't notice, and then you get people arguing trying to defend their gear and their lack of experience.

Hell, I accept the limitations of my gear, I can't loop on the 60 without sequencing, but I like it that way. I cant have 32 MB's of samples in there, I got no filters, shyt, it doesn't bother me, I make my music with what I got, but when I talk about what I got don't tell me that you can do all that with something else and that the resultant CD will be indistinguishable to a listener, because we are talking about making the music, not the result, are we not music makers? We enjoy the process of using MPC's? Well good, we can explore that without haveing every tom dick and harry that hasn't used a 60 or SP come out and tell us we're talking bullshyt.

I've messed with many samplers, there's a lot of great music I like that was made on 2000's and such, and a lot of stuff that was made on a 60 that I can't stand, the music is about the person, but the gear is about the joy of using it and how it gets you the sound you want, the finer details.

Yo Doc if that mirage is a rack lemme know how much.

Sorry yall, I don't sell my gear, worked to hard for it. Their part of my musical legacy. Also about that, gear is what you make it. I've made beautiful tracks with my older gear and my newer gear. But I was able to convert to some of the updated functions of the 2000xl from my sp1200, from my mirage to my EPS to my ASR (I'm working the Fantom in but the ASR is still king, to me) and so on. And I feel my music getting better NOT worst than before. I love the work I've done on my older gear sh!t the ASR is still my main sampler so I know what you'll mean BUT the ASR to the Mirage is like the MPC 4000 to the MPC60 and I would never use the Mirage as my primary anything! But thats just me, my point is, is that use whats best for YOU and no one else!! If your sh!t is grimey the way you want it do it your way. There is no right and wrong when you make music, anything is legal!!! And I am a traditional musician (play an instrument) and musicians don't care about rules, if what you use is not standard it's OK as long as you can play and make it sound good!!! Thats why most musicians have custom made instruments...

yo comparing the mirage to the 60 is way low man, the mirage is a nightmare to use, the 60 is a dream, and with the 3.10 OS, it is just as good a primary main sequencer as a 3000.

But yeah, you see the time you spend with the ASR you get kinda deeper and deeper into it, and rock it like you've never rocked it before? Well, some gear is worth getting into like that (ASR, MPC's, SP's, ) and others you just kinda use as a little flavoring then move on (Mirage!!! who can take the Hex for long?!) I just want to mess with more 8 bit stuff.

Yea, yea, yea... The ole' Apple and Oranges thesis.

I want to make it clear that I never was saying using 12-bit samplers is the defacto thing to do. In fact, digital recording and 16-bit samplers is the trend. Your breaking the mold when you go backwords and use analog recording methods and 12-bit samplers.

I like my Hip-Hop like I like my Jazz, raw and free-form. Express yourself however you got to, but that doesn't change the fact that ----->

PETE ROCK SOLD OUT WITH THAT AD. 20 Yrs of repping the SP, then posing with an XL.. *chimes the charlie brown horn. This is what this thread was intially all about . Elma is the one who turned it into a political discussion about 12-bit vs. 16-bit!

My bad than BUT sh!t Pete make your money pimp. He's just on the grind like everybody else. Oh so you wouldn't do an ad for a company in which you DO use their equipment?? It's not like he doesn't use an MP and he still uses the SP-1200 so whats the problem???? Just looks like a hustle to me. And El, yes the Mirage is a TERROR...