The Emulator III was introduced after the discontinuation of the Emulator II between 1987 and 1990. This rack-mountable version was introduced a year later. Rack 2 version with 4 or 8 Megabytes of memory, standard disk drive, and or / SCSI HD. The original EIII keyboard was the first sampler to offer 16-bit CD-quality specs with stereo or mono sampling at 44.1kHz or 33kHz. A 20-character backlit LCD, a 10-key pad, four cursor controls inc/dec buttons that double up for yes/no responses, a data entry slider, a number of dedicated buttons for the sequencer transport control and things like common disk functions, and a button per editing module. Analogue processing includes 3 envelopes: one VCA, one VCF, and one AUX that can go to pitch, panning, LFO rate, or LFO depth to pitch, volume, filter, or panning (more Brownie points). All envelopes are of the ADHSR stages. face EIII Edit functions: Classic looping tools with single stepping, zero crossing detectors, autocorrelation and crossfade looping for perfect loops. the special autocorrelation is a special zero crossing points. In all digital editing functions Crossfading may be linear or equal power, with adjustable length. Traditional function samples like truncate, cut/copy/paste features, also special resample function (for tiny memory) which is handy. A variation on sample rate conversion allows you to change the pitch of sounds with internal calculator features. Autopanning effects onto samples can be also routed to single LFO (too bad).

Hardware: CPU Machine uses a National 32016 main CPU, clocked at 10MHz. The EIII is entirely controlled by computer software which is loaded from disk when it is powered on. The EIII kept with the overall EII design, using a micro controller for sample access, a main CPU and a scanner CPU (Rockwell 6502 processor. The 32016 main processor and 32081 floating point coprocessor run the operating system from 128k bytes of DRAM in overlay mode (each module is loaded from disk when needed). The 32016 boots from two 27128 EEPROM's Sample Memory The 4 or 8 MB of sample memory on the EIII consists of 16 x 256kbyte (150nS DRAM), 4 or 8 x 1 MB (120nS DRAM) fitted on the top circuit board. Digital Converters The stereo ADC is a Sony 20018 (rather surprising !) and the 16 voice DAC's are PCM53JGI's.
Analog Filters The EIII has 16 analog filters (CEM3387) which combine a 3 pole low pass filter, a 4 pole low pass filter with Q, plus gain and pan VCA's.
CPU EIII rack Data Type: Digital Synthesis: Sampling Oscillators: 2 layers Osc Modulation: After Touch, Envelope, Fader, Keyboard, Knob, LFO, Mod Wheel, Pedal, Pitch Wheel, Glide / Portamento, Sequencer, Velocity Sampling: 16 bit, 44.1 kHz, Gated, Loop, One Shot (Phrase), Multi-Sample Sampling Notes: 8 MB Sample RAM Envelopes: 2 Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release Filter Types: 24dB Slope (4-pole), Low Pass LFO: 1 Polyphony: 8 Timbrality: 4 parts Modes: Mono, Polyphonic, Split Storage: Hard Drive, Internal disk drive Editing: MIDI, SCSI Rack Size: 19", 4U, Full Display Type: LCD Backlit Audio Output Connections: 1/4" Phone Jack, Stereo Main, Stereo 2 Inputs: 1/4" Stereo MIDI Ports: IN, OUT, THRU

Owner's manual