Re: another looper not on the site

[Joshua Carroll <josh@infinivert.com>]

Did you ever get any feedback on this?  I might be interested.  The part 
about chewing up the sound actually sounds especially interesting...

--Josh



michael sintros wrote:
> it occured to me i should make people aware of the
> existence of yet another piece of loop gear.  i'm
> speaking of the pyle pdsp850 phrase sampler.  this
> little unit i picked up online knowing nothing about
> it except what it claimed to be able to do.  they go
> for around $100 new.  it's a somewhat thin rackmount
> unit and is basically a very simple dj phrase sampler.
>  you've got a few different banks to choose from which
> give you different amounts of time to deal with
> (probably their way of crudely managing memory on this
> p.o.s.).  according to the tools of the trade site
> list, this would fall under the category of not being
> a true looper, since it does not allow you to hit one
> button to record and another to stop recording and
> immediately initiate playback.  in addition to the
> buttons to select a memory location, there are a few
> other buttons such as 'read' and 'write'.  to sample,
> make sure the 'read' is lit up and then hit the record
> button and it'll start recording, then hit the button
> again to stop.  then you've got to hit the 'write'
> button, after which you can hit the same record/play
> button to play or stop the playing loop.  it also has
> a knob for controlling the speed of the loop just as
> on a tape machine or record player.  the range is not
> that great, maybe about half an octave in either
> direction.  you can crank the knob all the way in one
> direction to record fast and then turn it all the
> other direction to get a greater decrease in pitch
> then if you had started with the knob at the middle
> point.  kind of nice.  main problem with this baby is
> that the sound quality coming out of it SUCKS!  it
> seems that levels that are already well optimized such
> as if you have a cd player plugged right into it
> usually don't come out sounding too bad, just a bit
> grainy.  but if your input signal is even a little bit
> soft, it seems like this thing really mangles it.  the
> knobs that control input and output volume also don't
> seem to behave as espected.  for instance, put the
> input level way down to avoid clipping (which is easy
> with this thing), you'll have to turn the output knob
> up to compensate for that.  so record a loop then play
> it back.  it will come out very very loud.  it's as
> though there is an automatic normalization process
> that happens to the loop when it is stored, because i
> would expect the loop to come out sounding as loud as
> it did when i was playing through the unit.  or the
> input and output volumes affect the throughput and the
> stored loops differently, which is retarded.  
>
> anybody else ever been unfortunate enough to buy one
> of these?  if so, anything you'd recommend to make it
> more usable?  i never use it anymore because it's too
> noisey.  if anyone is curious and wants to try one
> out, i would be willing to sell mine at a rather low
> price, since i know i have not exactly given a rave
> review of it.  but one man's garbage is another man's
> ... aesthetically pleasing garbage.  
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
> http://mail.yahoo.com 
>
>
>
>
>