Yamaha TX16W
A sampler that got no respect in its own decade and now gets plenty — mostly from people who never had to load a disk on one.
Overview
The TX16W occupies an odd corner of the Yamaha sampler story. It was announced at the Salon International de la Musique in Paris in September 1987, where Mix (February 1988, p.34) reported on the debut alongside a description of a vocal-vowel formant feature that let the machine "speak" as you played, with control available from the LFO, an envelope generator, or any MIDI data storable in internal memory. That's a genuinely strange thing to build into a sampler, and it tells you something about the era: everyone was chasing an angle, and Yamaha's angle was synthesis-adjacent manipulation rather than straight playback.
So why does the TX16W get talked about now? Because of the ratings. Keyboard magazine's 1989 multi-sampler chart, reprinted in Mix (June 1989, p.57), ranked the TX16W sixth out of fifteen machines with a 5.69 — behind the Akai S1000 (7.34), the E-mu Emulator Three (7.22), the Roland S-550 (6.14), the Akai S950 (6.07), and the Simmons SDX (5.89), but ahead of the Sequential Prophet 2002 (5.60), the Roland S-330, the E-mu Emax, the Akai S900, the Kurzweil 250, the Korg DSM-1, the Casio FZ-10M, and both Ensoniq entries. That is a mid-pack finish, and mid-pack is exactly what the TX16W was.
The feature list did read well. The TX16W worked in the Sound Dump Standard ecosystem, which matters more than it sounds: Canadian Musician documentation from the period lists it among the SDS-capable samplers supported by Alchemy, the second-generation sample editor for the Macintosh, alongside the Prophet 2000 and 2002, the Oberheim DPX-1, and the Simmons SDX. That meant you could edit TX16W samples on a computer with visual looping, crossfading, amplitude scaling, digital EQ, phase inversion, and reverse playback — the kind of surgical work that was miserable on the front panel and pleasant on a Mac.
The secondhand market has been kind to it in a way the original reviews were not. A classified listing in Electronic Musician from the period shows a TX16W with over 200 disks and the Version 2 operating system, described as mint, asking $900 or best offer. That's a useful data point for anyone wondering what these actually traded for — and it's worth noting that "over 200 disks" was a selling point, because the TX16W's library lived on floppies and a machine without disks was a machine without sounds.
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