For the price its a damn good deal but I'm not thrilled with its interface and programming architecture.

If I had more money I would have gotten a yamaha a5000. Yamaha gear works reall well together (naturally) and it saves me from wasting time on midi routings and shit like that.

the filters are bad ass and for that reason alone i will keep the esi2000 forever. In the future i see myself using it to create sounds and then transferring those sounds to a yamaha sampler.

Its not a bad machine but it didn't really thrill me and I wont' be buying any more emu samplers. For the price however it is a great buy.

To hear the esi2000 go to http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/328/shogun_helix.html In particular "omigod" the vocal like sound in the background is a ultra processed and filtered sample done with the esi2000.

Unfortunately, the modulation matrix is very limited. I expected to be able to do a few other things real-time, such as AM and FM modulation on samples. I also expected to be able to have better control over the range of MIDI controllers when assigned to various parameters. I also expected to have MIDI control over loop start and stop time (in order to emulate effects such as is done by BT).

However, this is a budget sampler, so I am not very upset. After all, I expected this to last only about a year in my setup.

The one thing that is really upsetting, though I knew it when I bought it, is that there is no external control of the unit beyond the MIDI control that is built into the machine. So nothing will replace the front panel. If SysEx were built into the machine, then a program like Cubase could have a front-end that could control all parameters.

But hell, this is a great piece of gear for what I paid for it ($550, which included an external SCSI drive and 6 sample CDs).

BTW: Don't expect to use this unit well without some sort of external storage (I use a Syquest SyJet drive, but anything will do). Most of the digital processing won't work without some sort of backup storage.