I have a chance to buy an Ensoniq EPS-16 Plus, for cheap. Excellent, barely used condition.

What is the consensus on these?

The EPS-16 Plus was a good sampler back when it came out. I remember it also had a solid keyboard feel which is always a plus. Just remember though that technology has moved on a lot in over a decade as I think it only sampled at a rate of 32Khz. How cheap is it? If it is VERY cheap ( $100 or less ) it may be a good deal. But buying a keyboard that old can always be a risk. Make sure all the keys and control buttons are working OK. Fixing an old keyboard can be difficult and expensive and sometimes parts ate simply impossible to find. Any repair work would probably cost more than you paid for the keyboard.

I think the most work will be setting up patches as you probably won't be able to find many nowadays so you will need to be a very keen sound programmer and sampler to get the most out of it. Thats what makes picking up an old DX7 easier, just that there are 1000s of sounds for it online. Setting up good samples from scratch is a long tedious task.


[This message has been edited by Nigel (edited 12-23-2005).]

I searched Ebay, and there are loads of patches available for it. Some place called Rubber Chicken, on the Net has stuff for them too. They can be upgraded memorywise, and the disk drive can also be upgraded to a SCSI CD drive.

Since posting this I've done quite a bit of looking into them, and it seems they have quite a following in some circles. The sound clips I found were quite good, too.

This one has been stored for over 10 years, and is in excelent shape and come with a bunch of sample disks.

If nothing else, it will be a fun experiment.

Well,
If anything Ensoniq EPS had sweet sounding chips and despite the OS being a bit on a quircky side they were quite good to work with and there were a few features that I personally miss on most of today's samplers. It's worth every penny. Of coarse if you're getting one simply because you want something cheap you have to keep in mind that it's no match for gigasampler or any of today's monster samplers when it comes to quality and amount of memory but library wise EPS are very well supported and like I said ; it's a sampler with it's own character and features. I think you'll like it.

-ED-

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A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
- - - Oscar Wilde

The last one I had had an OS problem...I gave it away, wasn't worth fixing..If I recall the drive was not working and it would not read the OS on boot up..

I see new floppy drives for $79.

Well it looks like you have researched it well. As I said originally the EPS 16+ is a good keyboard, just old technology. Make sure you have an OS disk you can boot from. 10 years is getting pretty old for floppy disks and they can demagnetize over that time. If it seems to be loading the floppies OK I'd look at trying to copy them to new disks soon just to make sure the data is good. And getting a SCSI hard drive would make life much easier. I remember using one back in 1990 and it had an external 20MB SCSI hard drive. It probably won't support large SCSI drives but any hard drive beats having to always use floppies.


[This message has been edited by Nigel (edited 12-25-2005).]

My first order of business will be to make new copies of all the floppies.

I found a place that has DSDD disks for $22 a hundred, and I will be ordering some real soon.

A lot of the interest for me is the fact that it is "old school", and that it still can produce quality sounds.

I plan on putting it below my Alesis Micron.



[This message has been edited by rdnzl (edited 12-25-2005).]

All the links for the EPS-16 I know about are at http://www.synthzone.com/ensoniq.htm Definately go to http://www.esqbase.de and register ( it's free ). Also visit http://www.soundcentral.com/ They both provide archives of free EPS samples to download plus the software tools to create EPS disks. You should be able to find most of the sounds and tools you need free at these websites.


[This message has been edited by Nigel (edited 12-26-2005).]