E-mu E5000 Ultra
E-mu's attempt to put the E4 Ultra engine within reach of home studios. The used market has since made it cheaper still.
Overview
The E5000 Ultra is a 3U rack sampler that shipped with 4 MB of RAM and 64 voices for $1,695 (some sources cite $1,795). E-mu's own advertising was blunt about the positioning. At $1,695 MSRP, it billed the E5000 as "the most affordable Emulator ever," the newest and cheapest member of the E4 Ultra family, as reported in EQ Magazine (November 1999, p.2). The E5000 didn't get a cut-down engine. It inherited the same Emulator Operating System, the same processor, and the same sound library as its more expensive siblings, with fewer outputs and less memory out of the box.
You get 64-note polyphony and 16-channel MIDI capability, expandable to 32 channels. The stock machine carries 4 MB of RAM, expandable to 128 MB. Sampling without room to breathe is frustrating, and that ceiling is where the platform actually becomes useful. The rear panel offers four balanced ¼-inch analog outputs, expandable to twelve via an eight-output expander kit that E-mu priced at $795. Conversion is 20-bit A/D and D/A with 24-bit internal processing, and the supported sample rates are 44.1 and 48 kHz. Input arrives on two balanced ¼-inch connectors.
The headline feature, the one E-mu led with in every ad, is Beat Munging. It's a loop-editing tool that automatically determines bpm and sets loop points. It also lets the user change loop length, tempo in BPM, time signature, swing factor, crossfade positions, and even the number of beats within a loop, all in real time. For dance and hip-hop producers working in the late '90s, that was a different way of working with sampled loops, and it's the reason the E5000 Ultra shows up in studios that otherwise wouldn't have bought an E-mu. The machine also carries 21 of E-mu's Z-Plane morphing filters, the company's proprietary filter architecture that lets a single filter sweep through multiple shapes.
E-mu rated the E5000 Ultra's frequency response at 20 Hz to 20 kHz (±1 dB), signal-to-noise ratio at 105 dB, and THD+N at 0.44%. Those are respectable numbers for the era. The 105 dB S/N figure is quiet enough that the noise floor won't intrude on layered, heavily processed material. The 0.44% THD+N figure is less impressive on paper.
Expansion was where E-mu made its money, and the E5000 Ultra's option list is long. Beyond the eight-output expander, there was an 8-in/16-out ADAT I/O kit at $549, a D-WAM digital I/O daughter card at $395 that added AES-EBU and word clock I/O plus an ASCII interface and 16 more MIDI channels, a multichannel effects processor chip, and several memory expansion kits. Sound ROMs could be added for built-in sounds from the E-Synth and Orbit/Phatt libraries, and flash ROMs could be burned for instant access to custom sounds. Hard drive mounting kits allowed an internal SCSI drive up to 9 GB or an IDE drive up to 18 GB. For computer control, E-mu sold EOS Link software for $40, Mac- and Windows-compatible.
File compatibility was another selling point the company pushed hard. The E5000 Ultra can import AKAI S-3000, S-1000, and S-1100 libraries and Roland S-700 series libraries, which opened up a huge existing sound pool to anyone buying into the Emulator ecosystem. The Emulator Sound Library itself was, in E-mu's words, "vast," and the ability to pull in third-party libraries meant a new owner wasn't starting from zero.
The E5000 Ultra sat at the bottom of the E4 Ultra family, below the E4XT and the other Ultra models, but it shared the same 32-bit processing that E-mu claimed delivered fast operation and tight MIDI response. The timing is solid, the OS is stable, and the Beat Munging features still work as advertised. The EOS (Emulator Operating System) was regularly upgraded with new features.
By the early 2000s the E5000 Ultra was being closed out at fire-sale prices. A 2003 Sound on Sound dealer advertisement listed the machine at £399.99, down from a UK price of £1,299.00. That is a 69% discount. The used market today is attractive for the same reason: the E5000 Ultra delivers the E4 Ultra engine, Beat Munging, and the Z-Plane filters for prices that would have seemed impossible when the machine was current.
Collectors and producers note that the E5000 Ultra's limitations are real but manageable. The 4 MB of stock RAM is essentially unusable for serious work, so any used example should be checked for memory expansion, with the 128 MB ceiling as the target. The four stock outputs are fine for stereo work but limiting for anyone who wants to route individual samples to outboard gear, which is where the $795 eight-output expander comes in. The 3U rack format is standard and fits any normal rack, and the front-panel layout is functional rather than luxurious.
What the E5000 Ultra represents, more than anything, is a specific moment in sampling history — when hardware samplers were being pushed downmarket to compete with the coming software revolution, and the result was machines like this one that packed flagship-engine features into budget enclosures. The Beat Munging tool alone justifies the current used prices for anyone working with loops, and the Z-Plane filters give it a character that software samplers still struggle to match. It's not the most expandable E4 Ultra, and it's not the most collectible, but it is the most affordable way into the platform — which was exactly the point E-mu was making in 1999, and it's still the point today.
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