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When the Emulator X arrived in 2004 it caused something of a stir. There were two reasons for this: first, it came bundled with a jaw-droppingly good audio interface that offered DSP effects processing.

Second, it channelled E-MU’s 20 years of hardware sampling experience into one fabulous sounding, easy-to-use and obscenely powerful soft sampler. Two years on, its successor has been unleashed. This no longer comes with an audio interface – instead, the full version ships with a 2-In/2-Out MIDI interface that also acts as a dongle. If you don’t want to use this, you’ll need to have another compatible piece of E-MU hardware installed (if you don’t already own such a piece of hardware, your best bet is to buy the Emulator X2 Add-on).

So is this a worthy update or just a cynical spit and polish job? Let’s begin by looking at Emulator X2’s main features (which are fundamentally the same as those of its predecessor).

Interface

The main screen is based around an emulation of a hardware sampler’s front panel and provides access to most of the major controls. These include 16 user-definable MIDI controller knobs and effects assignments. To the left of this section (in both standalone and VST modes) is a familiar Windows-style tree library that enables you to locate and manage all the presets and banks that are stored on your system (like its predecessor, Emulator X2 automatically scans your computer for all compatible files and adds them to your library). To load a preset, you simply drag and drop it into the ‘display’ of the sampler GUI. This works well enough, but the tree interface itself is starting to look a little bit dated.

Feature-wise, E-MU’s DSP architecture means that owners of any compatible E-MU audio interface can use its effects without additional CPU load (in fact, with some clever ASIO routing, you can use these effects within your sequencer too, although they can only be edited from within E-MU’s own PatchMix software interface). And, of course, there’s also the E-MU sampling range’s greatest asset: the Z-Plane filters. These might not feel quite as cutting edge as they did when they were first unleashed in the mid-90s, but they still sound phenomenal. And when deployed in conjunction with the powerful and straightforward envelope, modulation and controller matrices that have made E-MU hardware so popular, they can really make your samples sing. Speaking of samples, you can import a bewildering range of current and older formats.

Tricks

It’s fair to say that Emulator X2 gives you everything you’d expect of a sampler – hard or soft – and does it in a uniquely ‘E-MU’ way. But that’s been the case since the first version, so what’s new?