Yamaha A5000
A flagship sampler that shipped with 4Mb of RAM in a 128Mb machine — and still earned an editors' award.
Overview
The A5000 arrived as Yamaha's return to the professional sampler market after what period coverage described as years of absence, and the company came back swinging at the top of the range. According to Studio Sound (March 2000, p.56), the flagship A5000 carried a large graphic LCD, 126-voice polyphony, 32-part multitimbrality, and a 128Mb RAM capacity — though just 4Mb was supplied out of the box. That last figure is the one that stings: a machine with this much headroom arrived so starved of memory that buyers had to plan an immediate upgrade just to load a decent-sized library.
Digital I/O wasn't provided as standard either, which is a strange omission on a flagship. The fix was cheap, though — an expansion board added coaxial and optical SPDIF, and in the same stroke raised the sample rate to 48kHz and tacked on six extra analogue outputs beyond the four already fitted. There was no wordclock option at all, so anyone hoping to lock the A5000 into a larger digital studio had to accept that limitation going in.
Where the A5000 earned its keep was in flexibility. The same Studio Sound roundup noted wide sample-format compatibility spanning Akai, E-mu, Roland, WAV and AIFF — meaning a buyer could bring existing libraries across rather than start from scratch. A free waveform editor came with it, the effects were described as generous, and the sample-processing toolkit included resonant filtering, LFOs, EGs, DSP facilities, and the more adventurous loop divide/loop remix functions. A Zip drive could replace the floppy, and there was a CD-burning option if the sampler was tethered to a SCSI CD writer.
The A5000 didn't go unnoticed. Electronic Musician handed the A5000 a 2001 Editors' Choice Award among its 29 category winners — recognition based on products the staff had used or reviewed during the eligibility year ending October 1, 2000. Whatever the memory shortfall, the machine clearly made an impression on the people using it.
Context matters here: the A5000 was part of a broader sampler resurgence, and the same Studio Sound piece framed Yamaha as the market's "young pretender" following the cost-effective A3000. The lower-cost A4000 halved the effect capability, polyphony and multitimbrality compared to the A5000 and couldn't be upgraded later, though it still accepted the digital-output expansion. For buyers who wanted the full spec and the option to grow, the A5000 was the one to have.
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