I am old…
Back in the eighties I was super impressed by the latest sampler technologies, especially the three companies AKAI, Ensoniq and EMU Systems
Unfortunately they were both expensive and noisy, not least thanks to the internal SCSI disks they carried.
So I never really could afford to buy them, so time passed and samplers went out of fashion…
Well, not so long ago I found out that some talented people have built SCSI / SD solutions that are both cheap and easy to work with, at the same time that samplers have become cheap and now I’m back in the eighties, with a twist.
I found the BlueSCSI solution here : https://bluescsi.com it’s really easy to setup and works like a charm
I also bought a couple of Gottek Floppy emulators and flashed them with the open source Flash Floppy firmware : https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
this one requires a bit of geeking around, but it’s not that hard ( as even an old dude as myself can do it…)
A friend og mine gave this old AKAI S3200XL
I also bought a couple of EMU Systems E6400’s, and I am deeply in love with these machines, great hardware builds, and the software is a breeze to navigate and use, too bad that both EMU and Ensoniq was bought and buried by Creative Labs, not that creative after all…
I refitted b both then AKAI and the E6400 with a BlueSCSI and a Gotek and in the E6400 I also replaced the rather noisy 40mm stock fans with a Noctua NF-A4x20 FLX fan
so the machine are now almost noiseless, and loading banks and samples is a breeze.