images via this auction"The SP-1200 was THE drum machine & sampler combo of legendary status among old school rap and hip hop artists from the eighties and nineties. It is similar to today's Akai MPC samplers - it is a sampler plus drum machine. It has limited sampling specs: 22 kHz and 12-bit resolution. However the dirtiness of that sound is great for hip hop and house music. They say it sounds like "old vinyl"... It features groove quantizing and a disk drive for sample storage. As an upgraded version of the 1985 SP-12, the SP-1200 focused on its coolest feature - sampling. The preset drum sounds of the SP-12 were omitted, leaving room for up to 32 user samples of your own custom sampled and edited drum sounds.
Although this machine was originally released in 1988, E-mu has reissued them again and again due to popular demand. They continued producing them until they ran out of the SSM filter chips they used, around 1998. It was just too legendary to give up as it was THE beat machine for old-school rap and hip hop! Pictured above is the final reissued version in 1997 with the cooler looking all-black case. With the SP-1200 it's easy and fun to grab those sliders and tune or tweak your sampled drum sounds all around!
Specifications
Polyphony - 8 voice
Sampler - 4 2.5 second blocks (10 seconds)
SPECS - 256 KB memory
22KHz 12 bit sampling
Patterns - 100
Songs - 100
Keyboard - 8 Touch Pads
Memory - 32 patches
Control - MIDI, SMPTE"
