Yamaha SU-700

I had the latest ROM version 1.03 It was very stable, never crashed on me in the year that i had it. Manual was broken up consicely, and was easy to read. You wont need to bury your nose in it too far though.

The SUe's features are probably why i bought it instead of the MPC2000 or the Korg ES-1. The SUe's features are probably why you are looking in to it as well. The Polyphony is as good as most samplers 64. It's got the nice big pressure sensitive pads. Crazy effects. Everything is easy to use cause there are no menus to scroll through. All you have to do is push one button to any effect or filter
and just twist the knob corresponging the the desired pad. Thats it. And thats why i suppose people are intrigued by the SU. IT has probably the most amazing tweakability out of any other sampler. One thing though. The knobs' movements are funny. I have a MC-505 and a Korg EA-1 and the knob movement on both those machines is smooth. The SUe's knobs are senistive to speed. If you twist them fast the parameters are changed fast. You have to twist them slowly to get a nice sweep. I guess thats my main complaint. The knobs have absolutely no 'analog' feel to them. I also never once incorporated that Ribbon controller feature into any of my songs. It was cool to play with but not to use in a song. MIDI capabilities are basic. But most people will buy this machine for its live capabilites and not its baisic sequencer. If you want a great sequencer buy an MPC.

I will say the same thing that everyone who writes reviews on samplers say. The sounds are only as good as what you put into the machine. What types of music does this sampler work well for? Any type. I wrote some great ambient stuff as well as a couple of rocktronica tracks. Its a sampler, there are no rules.

I used mine for a show once. I had no problems. I even had it slaved to my Boss DR-6 and had no midi problems. Rock solid when syncing to other gear. ROCK SOLID. Buy a case for it though. It gets scary lugging it aroung in the same car as the rest of your gear.

I never needed to contact customer support so i dont know. I didnt need to get an upgrade either cause mine came with the latest ROM update, which is also the last update if you ask me. Yamaha has definitely stopped with any type of upgrading for this machine now that the RS7000 came out. If you get a SU with an earlier ROM version and want to upgrade. Yamaha only sends you the ROM chip, you gotta install yourself, which means pulling the chip in your machine and installing the new one. You'll need a pair of chip pullers. Sounds hard i personally wouldnt do it

I got it at ZZounds.com priced matched over the net from some other site that had it for 699. Zzounds beat the price and i got a good deal. I sold my SU700, so no i wouldnt buy it again if it was lost or stolen. I will tell you why. I own a lot of drum machines. Mostly Boss and Roland. I was so used to writing in patterns and then chaining the patterns to make songs. This is the way most people work. But the SU doesnt work like this. Its mostly linear when working with loops. You move the music forward by muting and unmuting pads. The Composed Loops pads are the only pattern based pads but you can only write one pattern per pad. The Free pads are linear and are the only pads that dont loop. Its weird getting used to coming from pattern based machines. It did hinder my creativity in the sense that i wasn't writing songs that sounded like the stuff i normaly write, but i guess thats good in some way. Also what bugged me was the slow floppy drive. I hear Yamaha has the slowest transfer and reading rates around. This actually bugged me alot, i didnt have the SCSI card so i used the floppy to save songs. Each song generally took about 5 or 6 disks, and waiting around while the SU loaded the songs was definetly a hinderence. Also if you made a little change to the song and wanted to save it, you have to wait while the machine writes to all those floppies. If you are going to get this maching get the SCSI card and get a Zip drive. But i hear even the zip drive transfer rates are still slow, but faster than the floppy of course. Well for all of you who were or are choosoing between the SU700 and the MPC2000 or the Korg ES-1 and want features get the SU700. If you want to be able to write a song like the way you know how and want better MIDI editing capabilites get the MPC. I sold my SU and am getting the new MPC2000XL with the built in zip drive. I am listenting to DJ Shadow right now as i type this and thats definetly the direction i want to go. The MPC may not have all the bells and whistles but it has the a hell of alot of research and development behind it, nostalgia and twenty plus years of momentum. i just want the say that the SU is a great machine but it just didnt work for me. Hoped this helped.

Straight out da box the SU was very user friendly

My favorite feature of the SU is the roll button.You can get some wicked ass "mantronik style" edits when sampling into one of the loop buttons and freakin' tha button as the sequence plays...sikk....I dont know of any other unit with said feature? I hear the MPC has a roll button-but can u freak it like the SU?

One thing I dont like is when you do sample into the loop buttons,it seems so damn hard to "smooth the loop" using the attack and all those other cool buttons.

I also own the now classic ry30 which I have never had a problem with//the SU has frozen on me a few times but thats when I had it on for about 8-10 hrs.

I have never had to call on there maker...wish I could say the same about ENSONIQ.....

The SU-700 is a remixer'z dream-I would buy another if something were to happen to it...wish I could say the same about my ASR-X...nuff said

I've got the original OS, but have never had any problems with it. I hear that the original 1.0 OS gives lockup problems, but that is not the case with mine. This thing is easy to use if you have had experience with sampling before. If not, the manual might give you a hard time while trying to figure it out.

The thing I like about this sampler compared to others of this type (the looping groovebox kind), is that it can play back all of its samples (40) at the same time. There are also lots of good effects and lots of stuff to tweak. Saving all of your tweakings is easy with the scene recall buttons, which let you recall setups of effects, pad mutes, and volumes and other things. There are three expansions that can be added (the SCSI port, up to 68MB of ram and the extra audio output board). I would have to say that if you want to seriously do anything with this you need the SCSI port and the Max Ram. The extra output board is nice if you want to digitally record to a burner or dat because it gives you a pair of digital outs and a pair of optical outs in addition to six assignable analogue outs. There is just to many features to list so I will stop now.

This instrument works best for electronic music. If you have the patience, it can also work for producing pretty much any other type of music. There are lots of onboard effects, and some are kind of goofy, but at some point or another you will be glad that they are there. The best ones are the delays, reverbs, distortions, and the Amp Simulator (this one really beefs up the sounds you process with it. The machine as a whole is probable one of the most expressive all in one boxes on the market. That is another thing, if you have a keyboard and drum machine or two, that is all you need along to produce tracks on this machine. That is what is so great about this machine is that it is a phrase sampler, and a beastly one at that, which means that all of your songs can be completely contained on the whole machine, and you don't need to worry about sequencing external modules and other samplers and stuff. If you don't want to spend a lot of money on exra modules and stuff, but want to make great tracks, go with this unit.

I feel that I can depend on this machine 100%. I have heard that there was a bug that locked up the original OS every once and while, but that has never happened to me. However, as far as electronic music is concerned, it is always best to backup your tracks on CD just in case the machine crashes, cause with all machines, its bound to happen sooner or later. And another thing, if the power goes out on stage, it's gonna take you about 10 - 12 minutes to load up 68 mb worth of music from a zip drive. So you better have something else to play while your waiting.

never needed it

I would buy another if something happened to it. I feel that this machine should have costed twice as much as I paid for it considering what it is capable of. This has to be the best bang for the buck unit on the market. I would compare it to those funny roland grooveboxes or the sp 808, except that the SU700 allows you to sample your own sounds and phrases and lets you be way more expressive and creative. I bought this over an MPC because if I would have bought an MPC, I would have been compelled to lay down cash on a synth module or two, and I just didn't feel like spending that much cash. The synths I already own aren't midi controllable (that's what you get with 80' analogue). So a phrase sampler worked out best for my situation. Remember kids, Try Before You Buy!

I liked this instrument a lot right out of the box. Sampling is a breeze, looping is VERY easy if you've got good timing with the start/stop buttons. Editing start and end points is a little tedious, would be nicer with a graphic, but is not any harder to do on the su700 than on any of the older samplers I've used (Mirage, EPS, etc).

One thing sorely lacking: there's no sample merge. You can work around it using composed loops and resampling the results but that's some extra steps. Or you could load them into your computer, cut and paste (or whatever, I hear you can do most anything with them new-fangled contraptions) and reload them into the SU.

FX are GREAT. About half of the FX are basic reverb/phase/delay stuff, most of which can be sync'd to MIDI with your choice of note resolution. The rest of the FX are weirder, like amp simulator, ambience, you can even make your sample sound like you lifted it from radio or vinyl even if you didn't. Just one of these FX is enough to completely rip yr sample apart. Killer.

I haven't expanded mine yet but I plan on it. The I/O expansion board doesn't route through the internal FX, which is great if you have a nice mixer with plenty of sends (or a lot of FX pedals) but I'd rather have the option of routing through the internal FX bus.

I've read a few complaints about the onboard sequencer, but I think it's great. Press play and out comes the sound. The scene buttons are a nice touch-- I hate MIDI, sequencing, programming and will avoid them at all costs, and the scene memories allow you to set up different "sections" of your track without having to record anything. It keeps the process much more "live." You can then record these scene changes into the song if you are an overachiever.

One complaint that springs to mind is that you can't change time signatures in a straightforward way, but since you set loop length in number of beats (loop length of 4 equals one measure in 4/4) so by changing the loop length to, say, 5, you have 5/4 time for that track, and you can in effect overlap different time signatures within the same song this way, which is something I've always wished a sequncer would do.

Another nice touch: different filter types and params, LFO wave and speed for each individual track.

The samples sound like they're supposed to (until you get them to the FX section, hee hee). I make your basic lo-fi minimal beat noise and this instrument is the shiznit for it, it is very simple and effective. Not to say that it's too simple, you can definitely tweak stuff out and make things very complicated if you want. If you want to play back your samples exactly as they are, cool, and if you want to chew them up, well it can do that too. Makes a fine racket.

I'd read a lot about the freeze before buying and I was worried that I'd have a lemon, but I've only locked up once in over a month of daily use. Sucks to lose your work but hey, at least sampling is really easy, so do it again and whine no more.

No basis by which to judge.

I'm a little atypical in that I don't do a lot of sequencing or programming and therefore i really haven't liked a lot of the seq/sampler/workstation stuff I've played (for example i had an MPC2K for a while and thought it was a nice paperweight) so don't bet the farm on my comments, you might think this thing sucks if you need to work it into some elaborate setup. If what you want is a shortcut to bringing the noise, go out and buy yourself one of these.

very intuitive to use after the awfull manual check,
really complex explaining but the su itself
very funny to use...

64 polyphonie really enougth very nice effects like ring mod
synk delay sounds good and easy to apply
mid implementation is basic

very intuitive and optimized for live acts....
pattern based, sounds depends on what u re sampling but with the 40's
effect u can really transform them:all in a live session!!

scsi is very slow,no flash rom option,difficult when the voltage on stage breaks down,u have to stop the seqencer when u change the song.
i trired to put an hd inside the su but the hd didnt start not enougt
ampere i think so i ve to drive the hd in an outside box.
very difficult to adjst exactly the samples cause no graphic display
but sampling itself is very easy.
i use it in a live act and with all the little problems it still remains very intuitive to use when u finished the sampling.

manual is bad explained no informatin about the hd inside!!!!
got the scsi card in 2 days.

easy to use good sound overall, good effect, newconcept of smpling power: timstrech live!!! hopin tthey will release updates soon!
really good and flexible to use live ,very groovy,nd good effects.
would by it again but second hand.

The SU is is not as easy as they say. It does do what I want it to do BUT after a bunch of painstaking tasks (tempo sync, time slice sucks... I used to have a little toy called DR. SAMPLE it had time stretch which was way easier than the SU's time slice, also it automatically picks a tempo for your sample... the only way you can adjust that is by adjusting the start and stop points of the sample, and this you must do about 10 times to get it right, forget it if you are a beginner to sampling).Manual isnt so good it is laid out sperratically (yeah i spelled that right.!..) it explains things 4 or 5 times in different sections so it is hard to look up something and get your answer.

64 voices is good. the sequencer is pretty tricky at first (but hey so is everything right!) but the way it lets you mute on and off the samples is the coolest. Not far behind is the effects and the real time features makes it good for live performance but getting from song to song is a bitch, you have to keep loading disks and you have to stop it and wait, you have to figure out your own special way to implement this machine into your live set.

effects are good , you can control the parameters in real time

Im not sure ,it did crash on me once but that was when i first got it and was hitiing buttons like a madman. I would use it in my live set because thats what i bought it for, and like i said it will do what you want it to, it just takes a while for you to get there.

didnt need it yet but i heard they are ok.... better than roland but that doesnt say crap

I got mine with the scsi adapter and 36 mb of ram , I recommend that if you get one you get extra ram and the scsi adpt. floppy disks dont hold enough (some songs use 9!) and take a while to load. This machine overall is cool and good and the quality of the samples are perfect duplicates.

Its pretty easy to use. Sequencing is pretty straight-forward, yet I still like the sequencing on an MPC better.

The features are incredible. You can record and sequence basically EVERYTHING! Filter changes, mutes, eq's, levels; its all there. The sampling is pretty easy and sounds great. Mine is already maxed out at 68MB; for drums, loops, and things of this nature, this unit is wonderful. It has pads that loop; it has pads that act much like the sequenced pads on an MPC. It also has manually sequenced pads. For remixing, this unit is tops.

It has three (3) high-quality effects processors built-in. The biggest downfall is that the unit doesn't come standard with SCSI for saving large samples. Otherwise, I dig it.

I do urban music styles (club/dance, hip-hop, R&B), and this unit does wonders.

It is fairly reliable. It does lock up on occasion, but I still have the original release of the OS, but I here that the later releases don't encounter the same problems.

I really do like it, but if I had the money, I'd buy an expanded MPC unit. Yet, keep in mind, the SU700 does a lot that the MPC can't.