I just swapped my Kawai K3 for an Akai S900 and a pile of cash. The K3 was one of those synths that are nice, but of some reason never is used. For that reason I decided to sell it.
I’ve also been working on converting Fairlight I/II/IIx disks to other formats. Akai S900 is one of them. So far I’ve used one of my Oberheim DPX-1s to playback the disks, but a lot of the S900 file formats aren’t fully documented. To be able to reverse engineer those formats I needed a real S900 to be able to set parameters. The DPX-1 is a sample player only, no parameter can be changed.
What’s interesting about the S900 and S950 is the fact that they have variable sample rates just like old drum machines like DX/DMX and Linn. This means that the S900 can play back sounds at any speed between 7.5 kHz to 40 kHz, and it does this by changing the clock. This could be described as manually turning a vinyl disk at different speeds. Most newer samplers uses the “drop sample” method instead. What this actually does is to throw away or duplicate samples. If a sound is to be played back at the double speed using the drop sample method, every second sample is discarded and never played back.
Next thing is to temporarily take the HxC SD Floppy Emulator from the Roland S-330 and put it in the S900 for testing my own generated disk images.