Ensoniq ASR-X Pro

Very easy to use being I've only had it for about six months and have made some pretty phat shit.Editing is semi easy if you know what your doing. And the manual isn't really that helpful in my opinon, I figured out most of everything on my own.

The pads are fun to use.Some of the effects are phat some are the same even with editing and some are plain.It is expandable to 66mb which will give you 13mins sample time.It is midi capable and expandable for 8 aux outputs.On board sequencer is easy to use.

I personally like alot of the instruments in it, they are coll if you tune them and put the right effects on them. It is mainly a hip-hop machine but I use it exsclusivly for techno/dance music. Like I said if you are creative enough you can make the effects sound even better than they are.It reacts well.It has velocity sensitive pads which I think is cool.

60% of the time you can depend on it. this is what really pisses me off and I want to pick it up and throw it out a fucking window, Sometimes you'll be in the middle of making a track and the bastard just freezes, leaving you no choice but to turn it off losing everything. This is why I start saving from track 1 now and up because it's very unpredictable, in the five months I've had it it has either lost or froze about 5 of my sequences.

They don't know shit.

I would get something else.I've only been playing for a year.I will soon be the proud owner of the yamaha rm1x. I love the sampler capabilities and internal effects, I fucking hate that it freezes.I compared it to the mpc2000 and chose the asrx pro because of price and the sounds on board it such as the synthesizer. I wish it had more Dance/techno based sounds.It is a big help.If you are considering buying the asrx pro sampler I would say go for it if you want a pretty phat drum machine ,sampler,synthesizer just beware of the risk of loosing some of the best songs and sequences ever produced.

worst machine ever invented crapola crapola crapola
glitchy!!!,freezes!!!,loses data!!! manual is weeek gives you no
feeling that they really even care especially seeing how im still waiting for the 4.0 to come out ......was waiting

polyphony is good the pads are good expansion you can put 64 megs of ram and a sound board for some killer internal sounds ...,the sounds that come with it reek of moldy limberger cheese. exept some of the drums the onboard drum emulation synth and the effects are the only cool things if your a pro like me you already have these cool features in something else

p-u smells bad in here expressive though but.....

you can NOT COUNT ON THIS INSTRUMENT TRUST ME YOU WILL NOT BE ASKED BACK IF YOU PUT YOUR FAITH IN THIS INSTRUMENT YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

WHAT A JOKE ,,DUDE!! ... THEY PASSED ME TO A GUY WHO WROTE AN ARTICLE ON ONE OF THE OLDER ASR MODELS ...THIS IS SO TRUE I SWEAR ...AND IT WAS THE GUYS HOME PHONE NUMBER AND HES ON THE WEST COAST AND I WOKE HIM UP OUT OF BED AND HE WAS PISSED BUT HELPED ME ALITTLE ..THE PEOPLE WHO SENT ME TO HIM WERE IN THE TECH DEPARTMENT AT ENSONIQ ...DOES THIS ANSWER YOUR QUESTION?????

IM A PRO HAVE BEEN FOR YEARS HONESTLY I MADE A FEW KICK BUTT LOOPS AND KILLER TRACKS WITH THIS MACHINE BUT ICOULD HAVE DONE IT ALOT FASTER SIMPLER ON A YAMAHA SU20 AND PAID 150.00 DOLLARS FOR IT

I TRADED THAT JUNK BOX TO A DEALER BECAUSE IF I WOULD HAVE SOLD IT TO ONE OF YOU YOUD BE HUNTING ME DOWN TRYING TO WRAPP IT AROUND MY NECK

Very easy to use, a pre-schooler could pick things up in a matter od a few hours. Just look to the manual for any questions that you need answered.

This is the Ultimate All-In-One Workstation. All except for the the things I'm about to say below. Features are very good if your using this thing as a hobbyist or as a toy. If your serious about your music then do not get this box.

Drums are good. All other sounds suck the fat one. This machine has the worst sounds I have ever heard in any unit. I admit, I have used the drums but basses and leads and everything else is just plain horrible.

The most un-reliable workstation ever. I have lost numerous days of work because of this shit box. Do not get the asrx no matter what anyone tells you. There aren't any proffesionals who use this crapola box. Sequencer is the worst I ever used. You can't sequence nothing on here and when you do, by some miracle, get a tight sequence, Guess what? It's either gonna disappear(Asrx's infamous disappearing sequence problem) or you won't be able to save it to disk drive or scsi. This machine is so bug infested you might as well call it a roach motel. Freezes more times then the arctic.

They don't give a crap about their users. Haven't answered my e-mail or phone messages goin on 6 months now. If you have it, sell it right away. If your looking for one, look elsewhere.

This is a toy. Don't be fooled by people saying it's a good machine. If some one tells you it's good, ask them a technical question about any gear and I bet you they can't answer you. You know why? Because asrx users are twits. I've verbally bashed this machine for over a year now and some people have told me that it's the person behind the machine who has to know what they're doing. I have produced several albums, I know what I'm doing and I know quality gear. I have several peices of gear in which I use my skill to work around their limitations. The ASR X Pro is one big limitation, WORK AROUND IT, FIND SOMETHING ELSE. Honestly the worst peice of gear I ever wasted my money on.

pretty easy to use though i had a hard time at first due to the crappy operating system(3.0 ) it came with. took me almost a year to figure out why this awesome machine wouldnt do simple operations like tap tempo its real easy to edit patches and such and can really go deep into the editing procces .make sure you get the 3.04 or youll experience a most unpleasrueable time

the pads are good and the sounds are very clear but they are only useful if your going to change them in some way tons of effects and they sound top notch . easy to use but will take some practice for the novice. expansion capabilities are adding 64 megs to the ram for 6 minutes stereo and 12 minutes mono sampling times
extensive midi capabilities sequencer is so so not as drum machiney as i would like

you can do any thing you want with this machine if you can figure it out

havent had a problem since getting the new operating system but when i first had it data would disapear and crazy poltergeist things would happen we will have to see what the future holds it was a 3 for reliability before but now its up to a ......9

the customer support really sucked they refered me to some guy who had no affiliation with the company and i ended with his home phone # he wasnt to happy although he was very helpful. the tech support was iffy too makes you wonder who even built the dang thing to start with

at this point i wouldnt buy it again but i also wouldnt trade it unles i was getting alot of gear for the trade. ive been doing hip hop and drum n bass and you name it for ten years. i wish this thing had a pitch wheel and non-volatile ram memory.so you could just go right to work with out loading your last session. from disk oh yeah
get an iomega zip drive to use youll need it to save your work.youll need a special adapter for connection to the zip drive

No problems. One can pull it out of the box and immediately. Sequencer setup is easy.

Great internal effects. The sequencer is a bit dodgy. It has about 10 different types of quantization, none of which are superb or really tight.
I have had to re do sequences over and over again, trying to get the timing right. The nice thing about it's sequencer is that fact that once sequences are complete, they can be chained together.
this is great for re-arranging and builing killer songs, once you get everything timed correctly, that is. I dislike 'linear', or tape transport type sequencers on workstation units because you have no visual way to 'build' the song. It just meanders on from left to right, and you just keep layering crap, with no way to cut and paste entire sections.
I have to say, the ASR-x sequencer format is powerful, and I love it, but the timing sucks and other problems lie elsewhere in this unit, which I will refer to later.
The Unit has all of the midi capabilites, but doesn't remember program changes. In this you have to set one of it's 16 tracks' sound to 'midi' and assign the approriate program number to match the one on the synth you want to
Also, the built in effects, which are quite nice, really add sheen to the samples withing the machine, and are easy to assign and manipulate. It is a shame that only one 'multieffect' can be used for each sequence, which contains sixteen tracks of sounds. You get around this by resampling, but if you have long delay lines or reverb decays, it will suck the hell out of the paltry 2mb memory this thing comes with.

Face it, most of the sounds suck. I'd say that I would realistically use
about 1/4 of them. The rest need to be lost. There are some interesting basses and a few of the drum kits
are reasonable, once effected. Expressiveness is velocity sensitve and rather nice.

I have included here a letter I sent to Ensoniq. Disregard the foul language, but if you expereienced what I have with this machine, you'd feel the same way.
This is the final straw with your machine......what a piece of crap....It is the second one I've owned, and both were having the same storage problems.
Faceit, you and all of us users KNOW It doesn't save to SCSI properly, giving error messages like "SORRY! UNEXPECTED EVENT 5 OCCURED!". Then, all of your hard work just goes to shit, and the machine reboots.
It is pretty damn frustrating when you spend six days on a piece of work, attempt to save it to Syjet drive, and you get a message saying "not enough memory", when I damn well know there is enough memory on the disk. So, I go out and buy an ORB 2.2 gig drive because Rubber Chicken says it is great, and recommends it. What does it do? It gives me the event five message, and there goes my music. It wouldn't save to a disk that had enough space to begine with, then blows it's memory when I buy a new disk drive for it.
Fuck it....the ASR-X is a toy, and nothing more. I have had these problems with both units I owned, so it is not a defect in the one I own, it is a systemic, operating system problem that Ensoniq knows exists and has yet to resolve. What is the point of owning a machine that that doesn't allow you to save your work. Way over two grand I have invested in your machines (not including storage devices) only to have the same problems. The songs I did save on the syjet drive would not load back into the machine, after the error message, and all of my 'Session" files were un-retrievable. The only thing I can acces are the raw sound files. ALL my prior work has been lost, forever! To a serious musician, that sucks....it is like losing a part of yourself....it is gone...and you know something...it is your companies fault, so fuck all of you for releasing such an inane, shitty product. I am going to post this message for all to see on the ensoniq users website and Harmony-Central, then I am buying another product that will do the job proffessionaly, and being done with this. I hope Ensoniq goes bankrupt for not working out problems such as this in the design phase, or at least continue developing the unit after the fact and INFORMING! their customers that problems like this exist and are being addressed.

OK....there you have it. I was pissed, and I did sell the ASR-x because of these problems.
I have it maxed out with 64 MB, and I can tell you, it will glitch and hiccup all over the place when it's memory is low. I started to lose sequences that I wrote. They just simply dissappeared! The machine will not give any indication that there is low memory, either.

If you are serious into sampling, buy an Akai, or EMU (although I don't know, now that they merged with Ensoniq. This little groove box is versatile, but as I said above. What is the point of owning one, if you can't properly save and recall your masterpieces?
I am really pissed at this machine. Somehow my files got screwed up on a perfectly good 1.5gb Syjet drive, then it blows it's memory, and it is not the first time this has occured.

Forget it. You will sit on ignore for hours..

Ya know, I have been doing electronic music for 15 years, produced records and owned/used a hell of a lot of gear.
I have tried numerous samplers, and evern owned the Ensoniq mirage, when it was first released (which had floppy drive problems, believe it or not), and is why I decided to invest in the ASR-10 and Asr-X. The ASR-10 pissed me off because it was a bitch to map stereo samples to the keyboard. Set the wrong note and you were in trouble. The Asr-X simplified it all by allowing one to send to whole sample to the pad very easily with no messy upper/lower note rang assingments. Wondrful, I said. This little machine is the easiest, most comprehensive, versatile unit I have ever used, which made me fall in love with it.
The "all in one" box I called it. Sadly though, it is also the most glitchy, bug-ridden unreliable piece of shit I have ever used, which makes it a love-hate relationship.
If you want to save your serious sample based songs, I strongly urge you to look elsewhere, as ultimately the machine will crash on you in the middle of your masterpiece.