E-mu E-6400
A 64-voice professional sampler that E-mu's own award citation admits the magazine never actually bench-tested - and then recommended anyway.
Overview
The E-6400 got an Editors' Choice award from a major magazine without ever going on the test bench. Electronic Musician (the issue carrying the award list, p.153) said so directly. The E-6400 was essentially a 64-voice, file-compatible version of the Emulator 4X, a series the publication had "thoroughly tested" - the original E4 having taken the same award two years earlier. It is an E4-series instrument, and it was judged on the family's reputation rather than on its own measurements.
The same write-up pitches the E-6400 as a professional instrument, and the expandability is the reason. The chassis carries three external expansion slots and one internal. Polyphony doubles from 64 to 128 voices, matching an E4X, and the eight balanced analog outputs double to sixteen. MIDI multitimbral capability goes from 16 parts to 32. An AES/EBU I/O card and an effects card slot in as well. RAM expands from 4MB all the way to 128MB. Electronic Musician put the price at $2,795 and conceded that "all this comes at a price," while calling the outlay well worth it.
The voice architecture is the E4 lineage's Z-Plane morphing filters paired with extensive matrix modulation, and the review singled out sound quality as outstanding. The operating system lives in flash ROM, so upgrades are not a chip swap. E-mu shipped it with two CD-ROMs of sounds, and the machine reads Akai samples, which helps anyone with an existing library. Load While Play is on board, a feature the review notes few samplers of the period could manage. It also has stereo phase-locked time compression, digital resampling, and Undo.
The one caveat the review raises is the learning curve. The E-6400's user interface and hierarchical file structure take learning. Once that clicks, the same reviewer reports working "fast, fast, fast."
The E-6400 is a file-compatible E4-series sampler with room to grow into E4X-class polyphony and I/O. The expansion cards and SIMMs that unlock that potential are the practical concern now. The fact sheet for this model carries no production-year data, so the
above is deliberately undated. Anyone dating a unit should go by serial and documentation rather than assumption.
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