Back in 1986, this hefty grey slab broke new ground as one of the first affordable drum machines with built-in sampling, packing pro-level features like individual outs and sliders into a $599 price tag that turned heads.
Its PCM synthesis delivers 12 onboard sounds—kick, snare, rimshot, three toms, open/closed hi-hats, ride, crash, claps, cowbell—at a solid 20kHz bandwidth for crisp, lo-fi punch that cuts through mixes. You get four sample slots with 0.2 seconds each (combinable to 0.4 or 0.8 seconds total), captured via a single audio input and tweakable with rear mini-pots for low-pass tone shaping. The desktop unit sports a backlit LCD, 16 velocity-sensitive pads, 10 fader controls for mixing levels, and five dual-function knobs for intuitive editing—step through pattern or song modes to record, quantize (down to 1/96 notes), insert/delete events, chain up to 100 patterns into 20 songs (99 steps each), or apply accent/mute dynamics. Tempo ranges 40-250 BPM, with MIDI In/Out on any channel, tape dump/load, and 10 individual plus stereo outputs for flexible routing.
Hip hop and house producers latched onto its gritty 12-bit vibe for that unmistakable 80s snap, praising the sequencer flexibility and value, though some note the short sample times and voice-sharing limits (8 polyphony max, paired sounds like tom/bass) keep it characterfully raw rather than limitless.
