What? Who? Oh! Musineer's Mercurial Customer Sales here.
@safeandsound123
True, true. I bought it new, when the S900 simply didn't have the grunt and the S1000 and S1100 were still too expensive and rarely found out of recording studios. Variable bandwidth per sample with, as posted below, 12bit sampling and 16bit processing. If reminiscing gets you a tad moist about the old tackle, I should mention that it shared space with an Ensoniq Mirage Mk1--which was 8bit. And a Yamaha SPX90II effects processor--mmmm.
@Mr2Hartman
Ah! Yes, you clearly owned one. That 12bit sampling did deliver a particular and lovely graininess that's hard to replicate. Loading samples off floppies was a bit of a chore but you could attach an Atari hard drive to the back for faster memory dumps and loads.
Using the Mirage and the S950 with a 4-track Teac cassette ATR (remember those?) there was a richness and diversity to the quality of the sound. An 8bit sample here, a 12bit one there, a crossfading sculptured envelope 16bit one under there, all tied up with a K1 synth using fixed waveforms, or synths using sample waveforms, or ... you get the idea. There were multiple sound generators working to different rules and fidelities.
Now, my laptop is where I sneak in a bit a music making on Fruit Loops when time permits. All sound generated by a typical laptop chip. I've recently reassembled the bits from an old desktop pc with an audiophile card, which means Cubase is back in my life (hooray!) but all the sounds are similar.
Using software samplers is dreamily convenient but I can't recreate the raw structure of the overall sound. It's a bit like old-fashioned ice cream that you chiselled out of a tub vs the newer fluffy stuff that squirts out of a metal teat. Or homemade mash made from whatever types of potato are left in the draw (with occasional lump) vs packet stuff.
Along with all the new possibilities that using a PC as a studio brought with it, maybe the loss of mixing with multiple digitally generated analogue signals took away more than just cables.
It's tucked away in a loft, back in the UK, if anyone's ever interested in buying it. But it might take me a while to reply.
