E-mu Emulator III

From DNBWiki

The E-mu Emulator III is a sampler made by E-mu in 1987. It featured 16 bit, 44 kHz stereo sound quality while its predecessor, the Emulator II, only had 8 bit, 27 kHz mono sound. It was comparable to the samplers of the day such as the Casio FZ1, or Fairlight CMI series 3.

The Emulator III was the sampler that Todd Rundgren used to create all the sound on his album A Cappella, using permutations of his own voice to create drums, backing vocals, and environmental noise.

It should be noted that this sampler wasn't as popular as its predecessor, mainly due to Akai and other manufacturers' competition at the time. The apparently paltry 8-bit sound of the Emulator II was in fact a kind of compound audio conversion, as opposed to linear 8-bit. So the sound produced by the EII was like a 12 bit sound, halfway between linear 8 and 16 bits.