what was your worst hardware purchase of all time?

DJRetard · Post by **DJRetard** » Sat Jun 18, 2005 4:55 pm

My worst piece of kit ever = TL audio valve compressor.

telekom · Post by **telekom** » Sat Jun 18, 2005 9:24 pm

I've got mixed feelings about some of my stuff... I got a half price Korg N364 a few years ago which I managed to use for a few tunes. The sounds are a bit iffy but the worst is the onboard sequencer. It is such a relief to use computer based sequencers after editing loads of stuff numerically on the N364's tiny LCD display. The buttons are utterly crap and navigation is a nightmare. but I can't complain about any of the fun I had with it. So it probably is my most crap hardware purchase but I also really like it...

We pay a lot for the fun we have...

braj · Post by **braj** » Sat Jun 18, 2005 11:52 pm

DJRetard wrote:
braj wrote:The very first Akai sampler, the one with the mini disks and the separate rack mounted disk drive with the little slots to put the disks. It was a little better after I bought an AX-73 and could run it through the filters, but a Casio SK-1 would almost have been more musically useful. Makes me really appreciate Simpler!
Are you nuts. The s612 was my second sampler and was a big step up from my previous one which was a guitar footpedal with a whopping half second sample time and could only be triggered by hitting the footpedal with my foot. Even then I wouldnt call that my worst purchase by a long way.

Value is relative. It wasn't a good investment for me. 1986 or whatever, I should have bought a used analog like a Prophet T8 for the same price. I would still have and use that now.

rm · Post by rm » Sun Jun 19, 2005 11:13 pm

Kas. wrote:
rm wrote: Actually, Herbert has used the the 612 in the studio since his early recs and has used the 612 on the aux send channel of his mixer to sample on the fly in live on stage. Good thing, the micro crowd never caught on.
Hell yeah!

That makes a lot of sense. After all it was meant to be a delay, originally. I´ve been joking that it´s the worst delay implementation in the history of electronic music....

This is a great tool for experimentation, don't forget the sliders can be modified to have input jacks, so you could manipulate the start and end points with control voltages from a modular synth.
Could you kindly, please pritty please throw me a link on this? I looked for info on it but never came across this idea.

Kas.

Hi Kas,

By the way, you guys ( the Bunker Gang ) really rocked the Fuse-in detriot festival. Kudos and gratitude for an amazing day/evening. I wished you guys could have played the main stage, you really had the crowd going.

Back to the control voltage thingy, there is no info on the web about this mod. Any qualified Tech with schems should be able to do this for you. I talked to a tech friend and he said it is easily implementable.

I plan on doing this to mine in the future. When I get around to doing it( time and finances), I will send you the schematics to do the mods. Basically the sliders pull a voltage and attenuate it from o volts to its max value. So you could use voltages from any modular synth to do the job. You mix the slider voltage and the input jack voltage together and voila. Same way as an Oscillator control section behaves( frequency pot , fine tune, 1v/oct jack input, CV2 input jack and cv2 attenuator , etc. all these voltages are mixed and sent to the expo converter to control the Oscillator freuquency)I don't know what the voltage range of the sliders is, so you may have to limit the input voltage range from your modular to be in range with the 612.

Regards,
RM

Sales Dude McBoob · Post by **Sales Dude McBoob** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 2:04 am

To this day I still hate the salesperson who sold it to me.

I share this feeling for the dude who sold me my fucking E-MU ESI4000 hardware sampler. This thread is making me feel better though. I'm starting to wonder what percentage of people who invested $700+ dollars in a hardware sampler is who actually hunkered down and learned how to really use the things???

I still remember the first line of the manual... "Sampling is an art, without a high quality dual channel preamplifier your sound will be shit." I was like ARRRRRRGH!!!

braj · Post by **braj** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 2:29 am

Honestly, me and my mates were into Depeche Mode and they were sampling stuff and we were really impressed, but when we got our hands on that Akai all we did was fart into the thing and play melodic crap sounds. Stuff like that, pots and pans etc. We were a far way from making really usable samples so it was more a curiosity than a useful tool. Like I said, Simpler is way more useful than that thing ever was.

DJRetard · Post by **DJRetard** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 11:25 am

Braj, simpler is like nearly twenty years later. You keep comparing the S612 with simpler. There is no comparison.

I can see by what you said about how you used the S612 that you didnt find it useful. sampling pots and pans will be interesting for about five minutes. For us it was about sampling real drums and recording them one at a time. To use this was brilliant. I had a few analog synths then but I couldnt afford a Fairlight or Emulator so the Akai was practically a dream come true at the time.

Kas. · Post by **Kas.** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 12:56 pm

rm wrote: By the way, you guys ( the Bunker Gang ) really rocked the Fuse-in detriot festival. Kudos and gratitude for an amazing day/evening. I wished you guys could have played the main stage, you really had the crowd going.

Thanks! It was crazy indeed. I dunno about the main stage, in the end our tent was a little more intimate and we could work like we always do; reorganising everything and dealing amongst eachother instead of through the organisation. You should come over to Globaldarkness.com, all the Bunker people are there.

Back to the control voltage thingy, there is no info on the web about this mod. Any qualified Tech with schems should be able to do this for you. I talked to a tech friend and he said it is easily implementable.

Ah, well, I´m blessed with a realy good tech. I think it´d be possible to hack in a midi to cv converter there, right? I realy like this live sampling from the aux idea but I´m not going to haul it around to gigs unless somebody gives me a roady.

I plan on doing this to mine in the future. When I get around to doing it( time and finances), I will send you the schematics to do the mods. Basically the sliders pull a voltage and attenuate it from o volts to its max value. So you could use voltages from any modular synth to do the job. You mix the slider voltage and the input jack voltage together and voila. Same way as an Oscillator control section behaves( frequency pot , fine tune, 1v/oct jack input, CV2 input jack and cv2 attenuator , etc. all these voltages are mixed and sent to the expo converter to control the Oscillator freuquency)I don't know what the voltage range of the sliders is, so you may have to limit the input voltage range from your modular to be in range with the 612.

kassen§kassen.mine.nu

You can contact me about this sort of madness any time of the day or night!

mikemc · Post by **mikemc** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 2:18 pm

How about my old Casio RZ-1 drum machine? It was OK after I got a digital delay and reverb and hooked it all through my 8 channel mixer, but at that point it really cost $1000 for a mediocre drum machine. But it let you sample a second of stuff and you could split that into four 1/4 second samples! Whoopee!

yeh, I jumped into that with both feet: "man, it does the sampling thing *and* it's an easy to use drum machine!" and of course the samples sounded like pookie dook. Funny thing is that I don't know what happened to it, I think it got stolen. It did have a fair number of ok drum pads on it, and wouldn't be too bad a midi controller now that I'd be able to hook it into some decent sounds.

crt · Post by **crt** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 2:35 pm

sweetjesus wrote:Stiefelmusic said someone should start this thread. So here goes...

me: Steinberg Houston... thank god I could trade it for something else.

Roland SP-303. Suck dog of the sampler world. Had it, hated it, sold it in days after I bought it.

braj · Post by **braj** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 4:44 pm

DJRetard wrote:Braj, simpler is like nearly twenty years later. You keep comparing the S612 with simpler. There is no comparison.

I can see by what you said about how you used the S612 that you didnt find it useful. sampling pots and pans will be interesting for about five minutes. For us it was about sampling real drums and recording them one at a time. To use this was brilliant. I had a few analog synths then but I couldnt afford a Fairlight or Emulator so the Akai was practically a dream come true at the time.

I'm not comparing it as a product s612 vs Simpler, I'm just making the point how lucky we are today.

borg · Post by **borg** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 4:54 pm

magma pcmcia chassis... had a really good deal, but it was now or never. it worked on my friends toshiba laptop with creamware cards, great. got it home, and it never worked on mine. sold it on year later for a lot less than i got it, and without having used it myself one second.

montrealbreaks · Post by **montrealbreaks** » Mon Jun 20, 2005 7:58 pm

MrSleep wrote:hi MrBreaker.

what realiy pissed me off about this sampler was its working structure...

it was so bad they even had an A3000 hate site going too!

you would be much better off with the hospital paraphernalia lookalike akai S5/6K beast.

Thanks for the warning! The one I was looking at was being sold by a buddy of mine - he wanted $125 Canadian. How sad.

Even at that price, it's probably worth it's weight in ping pong balls.

Sinjin · Post by **Sinjin** » Tue Jun 21, 2005 3:57 am

i cant even remember the name of this damn thing...it was a sampler, maybe an emu...cost me 600 damn dollars and required significant ram upgrades to be worth a hoot. used floppys or zips, the ram type was bloody impossible to find because it was now obsolete, but still pricey as hell...it took like 6 hours to do an fx process..the only thing i liked about it was circular panning...that was pretty damn fun.

adhmzaiusz · Post by **adhmzaiusz** » Tue Jun 21, 2005 5:35 pm

Korg soundlink digital mixer. Bought it for my 828 to expand my input channels, but using the menus in the thing was like trying to find your way through pinhead's box once you get stuck in hell.

what was your worst hardware purchase of all time?

Re: what was your worst hardware purchase of all time?