E-MU Proteus 2000

I "bought" one from GC recently, it came with OS 1.05, which is the latest. The OS can be updated via internet by the user, which is becoming more standard these days (Access! Waldorf!!) and is a welcome trend. The presets are not the strength of this machine, but thanks to the front panel knobs you can access 12 parameters nearly instantly. I found editing the patches to be quite straight-forwar, considering the two-line interface, and was able to get around the machine fairly quickly without having to crack the manual. The first thing I usually check outon a synth is the piano patches, and I was quite dismayed with preset #1, which is supposedly the showcase piano for this synth. The upper octave fades into nothingness, and the lower octave sounds extremely looped and fake. more aboout this stuff in "sounds."

Polyphony is an astounding 128 voices. 32 MIDI channels, very nice! The effects are quite good for a box this inexpensive, and were readily tweakable. There was some noise introduced with the effects, maybe a little more than necessary, but I was able to tweak them out. The board will accept four expansion cards as they become available from EMU, and because you can use an EMU IV sampler to burn your own ROM, it gives you the astounding advantage of putting your own custom sounds (up to 32 megs!) into the machine. I love that! One major bummer- the first Piano ROM expansion from EMU and Q-Arts, the "Holy Grail" piano, is only a 16meg ROM chip. If you have the capabilities to place a 32 Meg piano into a synth, why not do it???????

Piano sounds- HORRIBLE. Flat, lifeless, non-existant upper octave, looped lower octave, and the overall volume of the piano sample seems to be kinda low. Lots of obvious loop points and sample mapping splits. VERY DISSAPPOINTING. Also sub-optimal: the strings are thin and strangely out of tune. The brass is fairly good (no french horn?) and the winds are very good. Hammonds and electric pianos are surprisingly good. Basses are varied and extremely good (too many popped and slapped, though), and the drums are EXCELLENT! (Better than the EMU Procussion by a long stretch) Only minor flaw- no GM drumkits for you GM people. As far as not being able to construct kits, the obvious workaround is to use several of those 32 midi channels and construct your kit o'dreams that way. So what if you use 8 channels for drums, you still have 24 to work with! Also extremely good- many synth sounds, with a wide range of classic synth emulations, done very well. You can do nice portamento leads. The arpeggiated "bpm" presets are extremely fun!

But the overall sound of the Proteus, to my ears, is kind of thin and edgy. Maybe that's great for cutting thru a mix, but I would rather have all those frequencies and take them out with EQ at the mixing board than to have this vaguely cold, unsatisfying sound straight from the synth. I also am extremely bummed about the pianos, a huge step backward for EMU (I have a Korg SG-Rack to compare it to, it doesn't come anywhere near it- the Korg is much more bold, vibrant, has a singing sustain, etc. and they do this with about 15megs of memory dedicated to three piano samples!) My big fear here is that EMU put in a whole bunch of sounds ranging from bad to some excellent, but to get the really satisfying sounds you will have to spring for the expansion boards. I haven;t heard the "Holy grail" piano yet, but I wouldn't buy the Proteus without it. You'll probably want the orchestral ROM too, my understanding is that it will be 64 megs across two boards.

I have a EMU Procussion which has given me 8 years of uninterrupted service, I would imagine the Proteus would have similar quality, but it is only conjecture on my part.

Never contacted EMU. There is a Proteus mailing list, and EMU maintains a presence on it. I think it's great when a synth company gives you access to their personnel, or when one of their people makes the effort to participate in mailing-lists regarding their products.

The Proteus is a fantastic idea for an incredible price, but for me the most important consideration is the sound, especially pianos (I do a lot of solo piano playing, and have years of acoustic playing to compare it to) and the Proteus just wasn't to my taste. It is definitely a great product with lots of expansion possibilities, but I urge you to really spend some time with it (preferably in your home/studio/practice area) and really listen to it to see if it fits your needs. I am looking for a unit with excellent piano, drum and "bread-and-butter" sounds that could be used as a foundation for my VA synths, and was really hoping the Proteus would work for me, but unfortunately I ended up returning it. I will probably go with a sampler so that I can have the sounds I am specifically looking for.

I'm never been much of a techie, but I found this unit fairly easy to navagate.

The 128 polyphony was a very attractive feature.

Extremely realistic. Probably a little long in the bass voices and could use more linguring synth sounds. I hate when a string patch comes to a quick ending when the key is let up. Other then that, the sounds are great.

So bad experiences yet.

I wanted a professional sound and the Proteus delivered. Has a bit of a hard edge but I didn't want the muddy Korg sound.

For a small LED this is a breeze to use. I updated to version 1.04 by downloading the OS from EMU's site, it installed flawlessly. The presets on this are very good in my opinion, the drums are slightly better than my Alesis DM5, but are less editable.

The manual could not be any easier, as a matter of fact it is so easy that it is boring to me because I'm an advanced user. I will rate it according to ease though which is a 10.

128 voices of polyphony, no keyboard although there are many velocity maps that can be adjusted.

Yes there are some very nice effects, although they were slightly noisy in version 1.03 but when I upgraded to 1.04 the noise went away.
The effects sound very good and are comparable to my DP/4.

This synth is probabbly the most expandable synth to date (1999) 128 megs of rom total can be installed, the only comparable synth would be a Roland JX series board.

This unit has more MIDI capabilites than I can say in one sentence. The knobs transmit midi as well as the riffs. (this must be set up in master) Full sysex implementation.

There really isn't an onboard sequencer, but there are plenty of "Riffs" which allow a user to preview a sound without a keyboard. The riffs may be usable when recorded into an external sequencer. The riffs are a brease to use, I have to read the manual to see if I can load up my own riffs.

The sounds are top notch, I compared the P2k to every other Rom based synth (and an e6400 sampler) and I came to the conclusion that EMU is the best. The Roland board had a lot of great sounds but the sound quality of the Roland just sounded muddy and washy to me. I cannont determine if there are any really bad sounds on the unit. Everything is more than satisfactory in my book.

This synth can fit every musical style out there. I listened to some demos on the web that were very bad so I wasn't expecting it to be good for the types of music that I make. I do industrial, trance, techno, ambient and sometimes noise. I was in conflict as to whether or not to get the Proteus 2000 or the Audity 2000 for a while, because the Audity's demos are killer. The only difference between the Proteus and the Audity are that the Audity has an arpegiator for every channel and it has 12th order filters. Also the Audity has a lot more techno/synth sounds and not too many pads and strings.

I got the Proteus because there are going to be plenty of ROMS to add to it in the future, the Audity looks a lot less promising in that department.

Yes, the Proteus is very responsive to velocity and aftertouch.

I bet if I dropped this out of a second story window it would survive.

I would feel very safe using the Proteus without a backup. I would definetly have a couple of keyboard controllers though, because that is what would break most likely, as an added bonus the Proteus has 2 midi inputs, so 2 controller keyboards would be ideal.

I sent EMU an email before the holidays and they got right back to me. Right now it's the holiday season and I sent them an email and I have gotten no response, but that is to be expected for the holidays. They are probabbly on vacation. Overall I would give them a 10 because of their previous speedy email response.

I don't have anything to say about their phone response though, I've never called them.

I would replace this synth in a second if lost. It is definitely worth what I paid for it, every penny.

I have been using synths for almost 10 years now. I own an Ensoniq DP/4, Matrix-1000, Yamaha FS1r, Novation Bassstation, Roland Alpha Juno-1, Zoom 1204, Boss SE-50, Alesis DM5, a Roland Drum Pad, Alesis Quadraverb GT, Mackie LM-3204, Digidesign Audiomedia III, Sound Blaster Live!, Cubase Audio XT, and a Mark of the Unicorn Midi Express XT.

I have owned previously an Ensoniq EPS-16+, a Kurzweil K2000, an Emu Vintage Keys, a Moog Liberation, an Octave Cat, Syndrums, and a Korg Poly-800.

The Proteus is great because it contains so many sounds that it makes my head spin. I also dislike the fact that there are so many sounds to choose from because I can't make a decision on what sound to use, but that's a good thing. :-)

I compared this to an Emu Audity, a Roland XP-30, a Yamaha CS2x, and an Alesis Qsr/6.1. I took a long time deciding if I wanted the Audity or the Proteus and came to the conclusion that the Proteus is more expandable and has better sounds and more polyphony. Although it has less filters.

The Audity and Proteus have nearly the same architecture, they both have Patch Cords, the Proteus has more LFOs. They both have alot of midi sync options such as time based envelopes etc. The Audity has an arpegiator for each channel, the Proteus has something called Riffs but I think only one can play at a time. I have to check the manual for this info.

I'd like to see the Proteus 2000 be able to store samples via Smart Media cards like the Roland XP-30 and Yamaha CS6x uses. I would even be happy to buy a 32 meg internal flash rom for sample storage. I'm sure they could implement this in software.

This synth will keep me happy for a long time to come.

I love this box! I have it hooked up to a PC (emagic's logic audio) and a Kurzweil PC88 controller. Without using the sequencer it's a breeze to find nice presets. The first few pages of the manual gets you right into it. Tweaking sounds has never been easier. Using the computer sequencer you can access everything, the two midi ins are awesome for 32 parts playing at once.

Very easy to use. The manual is decent which is a hell of a step up
from must synth manuals. (i.e. Roland) While the LCD is small it still shows enough
data to make editing easy.

You can read about most of the technical aspects at emu.com. When I had mine no expansion cards were available. I think there 3 or 4 out now. Lots of voices (128)

Here's where I had a problem with the Proteus 2000. When I checked it out at the store I really was impressed buy the presets.
When I got the thing home and really spent some time with it the sounds became less impressive. IMHO the sound is cold. The orchestral string samples are flat out awful. I did love the bass sounds and most of the drum kits. One thing about editing the drum kits. You can't take individual sounds and add them together to make up your own kits. This to me was a real disapointment. You can take groups of 4 differnet banks and add them together but not individual sounds. This all boils down to no custom drum kits. The onboard effects were quite good. The proteus 2000 has 8 knobs that control things like reverb depth, adsr, etc. It's nice to be able totweak a sound without having to scroll through numerous software pages. The Proteus 2000 is probably best suited for dance music. I don't think it emulates real sounds (i.e. strings, brass) very well.

I've owned Emu stuff before and have never had any problems.

Their tech people are very kind and answered all of my questions promptly. I'm actually impressed with most music hardware support people. Try getting support on a Windows NT problem. Everybody just blame on either the software or the hardware depending on who your calling.

I ended up trading the Proteus 2000 for a Roland JV-1010 and an expansion card. I did lose money on the deal but such is life. The main reason I took the Proteus back was the sound. I know there's plenty of people who will say that this thing is under a grand and offers a ton of sounds etc. but it all boils down to personal taste. The Proteus was too cold and thin for my tastes. I currently own a Roland XP-80 with the Orchestral II and BAss and Drums expansion cards, a Roland JV-1010, and a Korg NS5R. I will be getting a sampler soon. Either an Emu ESI4000 or the Ensoniq ASRX Pro. The Proteus 2000 is really an amazing machine just not my cup o' tea.

Software 1.02. The least impressive aspect of this module are the presets, more on that later. In terms of editing patches the P2k is almost as simple as it's older siblings. I say almost because there are many features in this box that weren't in a Proteus 1/2/3 et al. The manual is decent but doesn't have a very good flow. I like that it's ring bound, it's easier to keep it open and not have pages fly out.

128 notes of polyphony, 32mb of sample data with 3 expansion slots that can hold up to 32mb additional sample ROM. There are nice features in this unit like a software upgradable operating system, patch demos in context, easy user interface...in other words a Proteus that has modern technology. What's particularly nice and why I chose the P2k over a JV1080 is the leapfrog technology. Although the Proteus 2000 has a sample playback engine it also has several interesting features like 17 Z Plane filters that range from resonant emulations to 6 pole exotic configurations that completely change the timbre of any given sample. Korg users, think 01/W waveshaping with more control. The effects processing section is good and flexible. The addition of realtime controls on the module are a real bonus. Sure most of us will use controllers or sequencers to address the filter sweeps and other programmable controls but it's nice to have none the less. This box has two seperate midi in and outs for 32 channels of midi, a nice touch, also the digital out is a good feature that many studio folks will love. The outputs are clean without being too digital. In all features are the Proteus 2000's biggest selling point. One last thing...I had some negative feelings about the Proteus series. I thought this would be yet another souped up Proteus with the same old samples and limited prgramability. I'm pleased to be wrong.

Out of the box the presets range from uninspiring to excellent. There is no real stinker to be found. For my tastes there are far too many basses, organs and piano patches especially in ROM. The discussion on horns/brass has been somewhat negative but I like them. I also enjoy the orchestral and wind timbres. There are a lot of piano, bass and organ presets and again for my tastes too many in sample memory but not so bad as to be a negative. For the programmer there is a lot to work with in the standard feature set. I like creating pads with multiple zones so it is a real bonus that E-MU saw fit to make each patch capable of using 4 samples at a time, something their comptetitors have done for years. What is particularly good is how you can access the filter system with each sample enabling very expressive patches that can emulate both realistic or synthesized timbres, a real strong point. Price has something to do with any purchase and what you compare units to. In the case of the P2k the competitors were Roland's JV1080 the Korg Trinity and NS1/R modules, the Alesis QSR and E-MU's own Audity 2000. In a perfect world I would have bought the Audity as it is an awesome concept synth. The problem with it is eventual, and probably soon, oblivion. It's not general purpose enough for the meat and potato bunch, there is a point to this, hang on. The JV1080 is a good synth but I felt that from a feature standpoint the Proteus 2000 had more to offer including a useable piano. The Trinity rack is very good but not expandable and a few hundred more expensive. Forget about the NS1/R, if you like the sounds and don't mind the lack of resonant filters it might be useful but to me it's more of the same six year old technology. The QSR is interesting and the only module not more expensive in the comparison but it lacks the filter options. If the Audity wasn't headed down the road of the Morpheus or other cool keyboards like the Kawai K5000S I would have considered it. As it stands it's $250 more than the Proteus 2000 and in theory the sample data can be added to the P2k leaving only a onboard multitimbral arppegiator. Between that and the eventual blow out of these machines (every music dealer I spoke with said the Audity was a cool unit but they weren't selling and didn't intend to restock) I felt the Proteus 2000 was a better choice. It sounds great and although some have expressed not being interested in programming that is one of the synth's strong points. In situations where presets are crucial I'd agree this might not be the right module for those unwilling to program although I'm holding off on things until I see the expansion SIMMS. There are already a bunch of E4 users creating libraries to be burned. That makes the Proteus a worthy synth, getting a bunch of good samples out of the box is a plus.

I've used or worked with E-MU products for years. The only one to need repair was in a university computer music lab where it was used 16 hours a day by some people that whipped the patch knobs of a Proteus 2. Although that failed the synth was able to sequence pefectly. The Proteus 2000 seems well constructed. I expect it will be working well for years. I know several people still using Proteus 1's and 2's with no problems.

So far decent but not great. When calling sales support about new sample ROM it was less than helpful. On a technical question I couldn't get through but the tech called back the same day and was very helpful.

If something happened I'd buy it again. Although I would check on other synths. The market is getting interesting. No matter what if someone asked me what to buy in the $1000 range I'd have no problem suggesting the P2k. I'm using a Kawai K5000S, a real sales dog but one of the most expressive synths I've ever used. I have been able to program timbres that are complimentary to the K5k and more importantly that stand up well against it's incredible output quality. Initally I didn't care all that much for the Proteus 2000 because of the glut of bass, piano and organ presets but after digging in a bit there is so much more in this synth. If only there were an option for a built in arpeggiator this would be one of the ultimate syths for me, who knows, maybe with an OS upgrade?... If you're looking for a synth that does a bit of everything listen to this synth. If you like creating your own patches check it out. Now E-MU, get in gear and set up a serious sechedule for ROM sample updates.

pre-sets shme-sets, this unit has over 1,000. Plus space for 500 user patches. On its measly 32 MEG ROM there are 900 samples of waves and instruments. HOW THE USER PROGRAMS THIS CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE. Three additional ROM slots allow UPGRADING. Editing patches-a breeze, piece-of-cake. Excellent user friendliness, realtime edit knobs.

As I mentioned in an earlier review, this unit can emulate ANY sythesizer, electronic or electric keyboard PERFECTLY! Just learn how to program! Presets are very comprehensive, from electric pianos of every make, to killer Hammond B-3 sounds. This unit practically DOES-IT-ALL! It is easier to list what it doesn't do (few words).

presets sound good, however Emu stuffed a lot of samples on the 32Meg rom card. I'm looking forward to the upcoming expansion rom (32 meg grand piano, orchestral-promised to be really great, proteus 1,2 &3, orbit, phatt planet, and third party rom cards). The programmability is the 2000's strong point. Easy to follow Moog style patchcord flow (and any modulation destination can be patched to any modulation source-the permutations are staggering) also patchcords are controllable 0-100%. Manual is easy to understand.

128 note polyphony--Talk about FAT, whew! Great effects-large variety of reverbs, auto pan, delay, flange, etc. Accepts 3 32meg rom expansion boards.

Its packed stock 32 meg rom samples cover something for everybody yet weak in certain categories ( I would have liked to see more and better orchestral strings, much more ethnic percussion-I have yet to see any company with decent authentic ethnic drums etc. Has GREAT flute, sax, 12-string guitar, accoustic bass, good pianos, AND emulates almost every electric & electronic keyboard PERFECTLY!!!

Friendly, helpful, even in handling a couple of my dumb questions.

I compared this with korg Trinity rack, Korg N series, Roland 2080, Yamaha newest rack, where I spent hours with each one. The proteus right out of the box blows away the competition in sound quality, ease of use, versatility, and programmability (500 user program slots). Reviews that Ive read here that put it down puzzle me. I started with Moog stuff 18years ago, and can program better sounds with my proteus.

It seems that others are blown away by the Proteus 2000 module, but I have tested the synth for a couple of days, and I am very disappointed. I think E-mu have done the same mistake as other manufacturers of multi purpose sample playback synths: They are trying to stuff the memory with as many sounds as possible, forgetting that it is not the size (RAM, voices or number of sounds) that counts, but how the instrument sounds! I have been using different synths for fifteen years, and I find the P2K boring, artificial and pale. Only a few sounds stands out, the rest have all been heard and played (better) on other synths.

Of course the features are great, just like having a big mouth but very little to say...

The realistic sounds are not good, but some electronic (for hip hop and techno) are. The acoustic or electric pianos are expressive or rich, and the trumpets and horns are terrible. Some percussion sounds are ok, but what kills them are the effect unit which I think sounds harsh and cold. Most of the sounds on the module will only work (for me) when the reverb/chorus is turned off. A plus is the knobs which can alter the shape of the sounds, though.

My experience with E-mu products is that they are solid built.

Good enough, I guess.

I would not buy this module, but instead spend my money on the Korg TR-Rack or Roland JV-1010. Or, if you are after real expressiveness in a synth, try the Access VIRUS or (if you can find one) an analgue Roland Jupiter 6 or 8, or an Oberheim Matrix 6, 12 or Expander - now, that's what I call synthesizers!

The p 2000 is very easy to use right out of the box. The patch finder system is a great feature. Plus the real time controlers are a synch to switch. Plus the audition button really high lights the patches potential.

128 note poly, two effects processors, 32 part multitimbral, read the other reviews for more deatail on features. One thing no one has mentioned is the effects send output and return imput. It lets you route an individual sound to its own out jack then where you can use an external effects processor, and then sends the new signal back to the synth to be mixed via midi controller
One other really cool feature no one has mentioned so far, is Randomize it just randomly creates patches with completly random settings the coolest feature on the synth. It comes up with some great things but some lame ones too!

Personlly after using a Roland JV-2080, I am just blown away. This unit makes Roland sounds look rather weak. Great for dance music, It also has really great FM synth sounds an Emu specialty

No one gigs with out a back up.

Haven't needed it to

Great module useful for anyone! If you are looking for something to base your studio around this is the thing!