This was my first sampling keyboard, and it was the root-cause to enter these wonderful world of unbelievable sonic experiments. If you interrested in these Hardware based Sampling Machines nowadays, you don't have perfect reproduction of the sampled sounds in mind. No ... this isn't the main purpose. You want this unperfectness, this limitation, these artifacts to create sounds that are interesting, unique, unheard and funny at the same time !

But it is still hard to deal with the user interfaces that most of these old Samplers provide. It was hard in the past, and today it is still not a breeze to operate them :o) But think about the year of production ... think about the problem from an engineers point of view. The most of them worked with a single 8-Bit CPU with 1 or 2MHz clock-rate supported from some interfacing circuits to handle some digital input or output lines. Analog to Digital conversion is mostly done "by hand". Means with the help of discrete electronics formed a D/A converter, and a comparator to achieve a fast-enough A/D conversion.

And the software development ... To get the neccessary speed for all the tasks with this limited ressources, you have to program it with the fastest available language. That means Assembler ... effective, puristic, not-reusable, in one word ... wonderful :o)

Absolut futuristic feature of this Roland Sampler is it's monitor and graphic tablet Interface. The graphic tablet DT-100 is a really rare piece of gear, and if you find one you have to pay a lot for it. I use my S-50 with it's native front-panel interface and it's monitor output. That works fine and give you the benefit of viewing your waveforms during the editing process.

The Roland S-50 successors, the S330 or S760, support a mouse instead of the graphic-tablet, but unfortunately the S-50 does not. So, maybe one day a DT-100 cross my way ... :o)