E-mu E-5000
E-mu's most affordable Emulator ever. It puts the E4 Ultra engine in a 3U box, and Beat Munging is the headline feature.
Overview
The pitch came straight from E-mu's own advertising: at $1,695 MSRP, the E5000 Ultra was billed as "the most affordable Emulator ever." That's a marketing claim, not a review verdict. The hardware underneath was borrowed from the flagship, though. The sampler runs the same Emulator Operating System, processor, and sound library as the company's E4 Ultra line, just in a lower-cost 3U rack chassis. Players who wanted the Ultra engine without the Ultra price got in here.
E-mu fitted 20-bit A/D and D/A converters around 24-bit internal processing. It supports sample rates of 44.1 and 48 kHz. Published specs are frequency response of 20 Hz to 20 kHz (±1 dB), signal-to-noise of 105 dB, and THD+N of 0.44%. That THD figure reads a touch high for a modern digital box, but it's the number E-mu published, and owners have lived with it happily for years. Polyphony is 64 voices out of the box, and the machine accepts up to 128MB of RAM, which is generous for a sampler in this class. I/O starts at four balanced ¼-inch outputs, expandable to twelve with the eight-output expander kit.
The software is what separates the E5000 from a generic sample playback box. E-mu's proprietary Beat Munging loop-editing tool automatically determines BPM and sets loop points. From there you can change loop length, tempo, time signature, swing factor, crossfade positions, and even the number of beats inside the loop, all in real time. For dance and hip-hop producers working without a DAW's elastic audio, that was a serious workflow advantage. The 21 Z-Plane morphing filters carry over from the E4 Ultra. The machine also imports AKAI S-3000/1000/1100 and Roland S-700 series libraries, which counted for a lot when the secondhand sample market was built on those formats.
Expansion follows E-mu's module approach. Beyond the output expander, there's an 8-in/16-out ADAT I/O kit and a D-WAM digital I/O daughter card. The D-WAM adds AES-EBU and word clock, plus an ASCII interface and 16 more MIDI channels. There are also sound ROMs for the E-Synth and Orbit/Phatt libraries, flash ROMs for burning custom sounds, and internal SCSI (up to 9GB) or IDE (up to 18GB) drive mounting kits. MIDI starts at 16 channels and upgrades to 32. EOS Link software, a $40 Mac/Windows purchase, lets you drive the thing from a computer. One catch: E-mu's own copy lists the ADAT kit as adding 16 optical outputs and 8 inputs, so confirm against the specific kit revision if that I/O count matters to your setup.
The E5000 found its way into working studios as well as bedrooms. Producer and songwriter Greg Laswell packed one into a cabin outside Flagstaff, Arizona, while making Take a Bow. He loaded it with drum and Mellotron samples alongside his Nord Stage, Electro 2, and a stack of guitars. As relayed in EQ magazine, his workflow was to pull up a preset in edit mode, detune it, and play it while still in the edit screen. That let him land sounds he wouldn't otherwise have reached.
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