www.vintagesynth.com :  The ’16′ in TX16W stands for 16-voices, which is nice, but unfortunately it does not apply to this late-eighties sampler’s specs! It’s only 12-bit (as opposed to 16-bit) and shipped with a slim 1.5 MB of RAM. Albeit, this is a sampler more than 15 years old! Supposedly marking Yamaha’s entry into professional rack-mount samplers, the TX16W seems to take it’s rack-design from Yamaha’s REV-series effects processors. A narrow 2-line LCD display, numeric keypad and about a dozen other buttons makes for a lousy sample-editing experience – yet this was how it was done in 1988! With internal RAM expandable up to 6 MB’s, floppy disk storage, digital filters, and 8-part multitimbral operation, the TX16W was good for its time but is certainly now, a dinosaur.

This 12-bit sampler has a variable 50 kHz sampling-rate without aliasing, eight monophonic outputs, polyphonic stereo out and an external audio input (Mic, Line) on the front-panel. The original TX16W’s System OS had to be loaded from 720kb disks in non-DOS format, and frequently needed reloads from the System disk. Moreover this OS is one of the worst ever made. Alternative: Typhoon 2000, a freeware OS provides much easier handling, support for RS422 (you can connect it directly to the built-in MIDI interface of a Mac for SCSI-like communication), 17 factory filters and support for the AIFF audio format. Typhoon is a must have to stay healthy while working with this sampler. It is good for M1-type pianos, percussion sounds, voice samples and your basic 80′s style sounds. It has been used by Jimmy Edgar.

The Typhoon OS disk includes some excellent sounds to demonstrate the modulation and sound quality. The drum kit is especially noteworthy, because it is created from basic waveforms. It proves the great flexibility of the modulation. Incidentally, Magnus Lindstroem of Nu-Edge has recently developed a VST/ AU drum synth plugin.

FORMAT: wav
41,000 hertz 16 bit samples
Number of samples: 36

Download! 807 kb