E-mu ESI-32
E-mu's bid to put Emulator-grade sampling in the hands of people who couldn't afford an Emulator.
Overview
The ESI-32 arrived at a moment when the street price of a serious sampler was still measured in the thousands, and E-mu's own Emulator line was the aspirational object at the top of the heap. The pitch was blunt: in Sound-on-Sound (1995, p.139), E-mu's advertising promised "more power than samplers costing twice the price," and asked the reader to wonder what the catch was. The answer, per the company's own copy, was nothing — the ESI-32 was "jammed with the same features" that made the Emulator IIIx indispensable in studios and on stage. That's marketing, not a verdict, but the feature list behind it was real enough: 16-bit audio resolution, 32-voice polyphony, up to 32 MB of sample memory, and compatibility with EIIIx, Emax II, and Akai S1000/S1100 libraries.
What the box actually is: a 2U rack-mount sampler with no keyboard, no sequencer, and no effects to speak of beyond a switchable chorus. Electronic Musician (review by Geary Yelton) put it plainly — "It's not a workstation; it's a sampler." For anyone who came up on the Emulator series and expected the ESI-32 to be a cut-down EIII, that framing matters. It samples at 22.05 or 44.1 kHz with 16-bit resolution, offers 32-voice polyphony with mono samples or sixteen voices in stereo, and carries a resonant lowpass filter per voice. The architecture will feel familiar to anyone who has programmed a synth: each voice gets that resonant lowpass filter, three AHDSR envelopes, and one multi-waveform LFO. Highpass and other filter modes aren't available — lowpass only.
The list price was $1,495, which Electronic Musician called "attention grabbing" and immediately followed with the obvious question: what's wrong with it? The honest answer from that review was that nothing was wrong with the instrument itself — but the baseline configuration was thin. Two megabytes of RAM standard, and the reviewer's advice was to plan on options from day one. The two big ones: the SCSI interface at $250 and more memory. The unit can address up to 32 MB of RAM, but the stock two 1 MB SIMMs live in 30-pin slots, and expanding means pulling them and installing matched pairs of 4 or 16 MB SIMMs to reach 8 or 32 MB. There are four SIMM slots total, which the reviewer wished had allowed 64 MB, but didn't.
Storage was the other fork in the road. Floppy-only work is a slog, so the SCSI option matters — it provides a single 50-pin port on the back panel, meaning the sampler has to sit at one end of a SCSI chain. The SCSI ID is changed easily in the SCSI Setup screen, and the implementation allows up to seven master devices to share the same bus, which lets multiple samplers share a CD-ROM or hard drive with minimal conflict. There's also a Disk Utilities parameter to make the ESI-32 avoid a host at any SCSI ID you specify — useful when a Mac is on the same chain. The alternative to SCSI storage was E-mu's internal 270 MB SyQuest removable drive, which added $1,000 to the price — twice what a comparable external SyQuest cost, as the reviewer pointed out — and sacrificed the floppy-drive port. The recommendation was to buy external and keep the floppy drive.
Where the ESI-32 earns its keep is in the editing and processing depth. Sample-rate conversion is continuously variable from 7 to 50 kHz. The one-band parametric EQ boosts a specified band by up to +12 dB or cuts it by as much as -48 dB, with definable center frequency and bandwidth. Time compression changes a sample's length without changing pitch, with ten compression/expansion types depending on the source material — deep bass through tight drum loops through noisy non-pitched sounds. Pitch Change shifts pitch without altering length, from as little as one cent up to an octave in either direction, and the results were judged to sound quite good. Transform Multiplication merges two samples by retaining shared frequencies and discarding the rest, producing a reinforced harmonic spectrum — a slow process with no graceful way to interrupt it once started, and one whose output ranges from useful to genuinely ugly depending on how the harmonics line up.
The looping tools are thorough for the era. Only one forward loop is available per sample, but it can play during the release phase of the VCA envelope, and the loop start and size can be changed while monitoring the sound. An Auto Correlation function finds the best loop start and end points closest to the ones you specify, and Loop Compression minimizes amplitude changes across the loop. Equal-power crossfade looping suppresses dramatic level shifts, while linear crossfade fixes loops that aren't quite perfect. Cut, copy, and paste work within a sample or between samples, with the selected portions temporarily backed up to disk — and if there's enough hard-disk space and the disk isn't locked, Undo and Redo can cancel or restore the last editing operation. The reviewer's gripe was ergonomic: no physical Undo button on the front panel, so undoing means navigating into the Digital Processing Submodule every time.
Sound acquisition is where the ESI-32 punches above its price. It imports via SCSI in EIII, EIIIx, Emax II, and Akai S1000 formats, and the Akai S1000 format is the most popular for bringing in third-party material. Parameters that don't exist on the ESI-32 are ignored on import; where an Akai program layers more than two samples on a key, a Full Placement function creates up to four Presets and links them all to that key, ignoring velocity switching and crossfading — turn Full Placement off and only the first two samples per key come in. An Adjust Loops function corrects sample-looping problems that surface during translation. SMDI import brings in raw samples and key maps with pitch information, though not Banks, Presets, or most parameter data; the reviewer used Passport's Alchemy 3.0 to move samples back and forth without issue.
The user interface follows E-mu tradition: samples are arranged into Presets and stored in Banks, one Bank loaded at a time, with each Bank holding up to 999 samples and up to 256 Presets. A Multimode button enables MIDI reception on sixteen channels, each with its own Preset, Volume, and Pan assignments. The 2 x 40 character LCD is bright and large enough to avoid eyestrain. Up to six MIDI messages can be assigned to control any of nine internal parameters in real time, and pitch, VCA level, and attack time can be modulated by velocity. Portamento glides between notes at a user-defined rate. There are no footswitch or pedal jacks. The ESI-32 also lacks the EIIIx's arpeggiator, and there's no graphic editing of samples or envelopes.
I/O is the most common complaint. Beyond the main stereo outputs there's a pair of Sub Out/Mix In jacks that can serve as either effects send/return or a pair of assignable outputs — but that's the ceiling. All four outputs are unbalanced quarter-inch jacks, and if you need more than four outputs you're out of luck. The optional S/PDIF digital interface at $200 lets the ESI-32 exchange audio with DAT machines, hard-disk recorders, and other S/PDIF-equipped devices, with analog and digital outputs usable simultaneously; AES/EBU ports aren't available. The reviewer flagged the paucity of assignable outputs as a potentially serious problem for some users, and the 32 MB memory ceiling as a hard stop for anyone who needs more — though, as noted, not many instruments of the era would fill that need either.
The verdict from Electronic Musician was that the price/performance ratio was remarkable, the sound excellent, and the ease of use outstanding — with the SCSI option working flawlessly and the removable drive proving more flexible than a fixed hard drive. The closing line aimed squarely at the reader who had always admired Emulators they couldn't afford: here was the chance to join the pack. For anyone who wants a sampler and finds one in their price range, the ESI-32 was named a major contender. The caveats were the ones already noted — outputs, memory ceiling, no workstation features — and the suggestion that anyone wanting heavy matrix-modulation processing should look at the Emulator IV or e-64 instead.
Today the ESI-32 occupies an interesting spot in the E-mu catalog: cheaper and simpler than the Emulator line, more capable than the bare-bones boxes, and tied into one of the deepest sample libraries of the era through its EIIIx, Emax II, and Akai compatibility. Buyers should expect to find units with the SCSI option fitted, since it was near-essential, and should check the RAM configuration carefully — a stock 2 MB machine is a starting point, not a working instrument. The chorus is the only onboard effect, so plan on outboard processing. The lack of a front-panel Undo button is a small annoyance that never goes away. None of that changes what the ESI-32 is: a focused, expandable sampler that delivered Emulator-grade audio resolution at a price that made the Emulator faithful take notice.
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