(Simon N Goodwin owns the copyright to this review. Please visit http://simon.mooli.org.uk to find original articles and updates, much new material and his contact details.)

Producer: Datel Ltd
Retail Price: £49.99

We first reviewed the original DATEL Sound Sampler way back about June 1985, This is the 1986 upgrade (alas we had only the 48K version), and I'm sorry to report that there really isn't a large amount of improvement. Okay, it's not so noisy and the reproduction of the samples is notably better, but I really think that DATEL could have also put some effort into the software and presentation of the package, especially as the sampler 'war' is hotting hot with CHEETAH and RAM/FLARE getting in on the act.

So what do you get for your 50 notes? The usual hardware box and cheapo microphone plus software. Load up and away we go. Big "oops" here as you're only told how to plug in the incorrectly labelled hardware at the END of the instructions - and I'm still baffled by the little trim pot on the back. The options are very much the same as the old DATEL product and work very much in the same manner - with a few extras.

Record uses an automatic sound sensor that triggers the sampling above a certain threshold of sound. Trouble is, it's too sensitive by half and is not adjustable. DATEL seem to think that you are blessed with three or more appendages as you need to hold down the 'R' key during recording. Great for things like guitar, flute and anything percussive where two hands are needed - not to mention one to hold the microphone. As it is so sensitive and awkward to use, you often have great big gaps before and after your sample.

The technical wonder of actual sampling is not so wonderful anymore, and we should now demand easily manipulative facilities from any self-respecting sampler. What ain't we got? That's right. You can't do a damn thing with at as regards editing. The unit will actually show you the wave of the sound sample - just like the original version did: this option was useless then, and it still is. The lack of editing really relegates this product to the second division.

Four Part Sound one ray of hope is the option to record four different sounds and play them back from the numeric keys. This is fine, but you can alter the pitch in this mode of operation.

Playback the playback mode proper is quite good in that it displays a static piano keyboard on screen to be played from qwerty keys, and it has an amazing 9 octave range which will defy the human ear. Anything you play is automatically stuffed in a real-time sequencer which will play back your first 100 notes (albeit not quite as faithfully as DATEL might claim, as the timing alters from your version). I would suspect too generous a quantisation here - that is, the 'rounding up' function found on drum machines to correct minor timing errors.

Sounds may be played in reverse or stuffed through some novelty features like 'Riser', which replays the sample 8 times at a higher pitch each time, or 'Chop Play' which replays the sample 8 times at the same pitch only shortening the length of the sample on each repetition. I'd rather have some editing instead of the digital whoopee cushion provided by these redundant features.

Echo offers nine preset echo effects. You have to return to the main menu each time to change them - rather annoying!

Microphone Level Tester simply routes the signal straight through to the the output and to your amplification.

Load/Save samples can be dumped to tape or Microdrive.

In practice, you have very little control over what the DATEL sound sampler does. Sure, it samples and does some party tricks with the sound, but you, the user, are pretty well subservient to some dogmatic software with very little room to manoeuvre. There is no MIDI option or synchronisation facility and on the light of other samplers now available, this package is very bovine indeed. It demands some drastic software rewriting to justify its price in face of the competition.

Spectrum 48K
Datel Electronics
£49.95

What do you do with your Spectrum when you've finally got fed up with the mind-blowing tedium of blasting little green splodges into oblivion? Rather than consign the thing to the back of the wardrobe, you might like to turn it into a powerful musical effects machine.

Until now, digital sound samplers have been the province of rock millionaires with nothing better to do than sample the particularly satisfying crunch you get when smashing a TV tube. Well, now you too can join in this fun hobby.

What Datel's little gadget does is store sound input from a microphone or your hi-fi and allow you to mess around with it, the results are really quite amazing. You do also need an amplifier to output the sound from the unit.

With the hardware, which clips onto the expansion socket, you get a tape with four effects programs on it and three sheets of clear and concise instructions.

The first program goes through the first principles of sampling and playback. There are effects such as echo, chopping and reversing. You can vary the time of the echo up to over a second.

The second program turns the Spectrum into a keyboard, the note you play modulating the sound you have sampled. The method of changing octave is somewhat clumsy, but it is an effective sample. The real meat is in the third program which allows you to compose a tune of up to 1,000 notes and rests, each with selectable length and pitch over four octaves.

Assuming you've got a Stradivarius handy, all you have to do is play one note into the mike, write a little tune and Yehudi Menuhin wouldn't know he difference.

SAMPLING THE SOUND WITH DATEL

Messrs Bates and Kidd poke their noses into a piece of musical hardware.

Sound sampling technology is not new - mega expensive studio systems have been in existence for quite a few years. They are used to capture real sounds, recorded conventionally, and convert them into digital form. Once a sound has been captured and converted into numbers, it can be stored in computer memory, manipulated and edited before being reconverted into an analogue signal for playback. All sorts of whizzo effects can be added during the editing stage, and the sounds engineered for bands such as Frankie Goes To Hollywood owe a lot to sound sampling techniques.

Super sophisticated samplers, which included complicated software for editing sounds and creating effects can cost tens of thousands of pounds. Consequently, they are beyond the reach of most people's pockets and are the preserve of professionals.

Datel's sound sampler for the Spectrum is available for a little under £50 and comes complete with a cheapo microphone and a cassette of software to drive the hardware. Overall, it represents excellent value as an introduction to sampling sounds and fiddling around with them under computer control. The musician, the keen games programmer and the general interest user could all have a lot of fun with Datel's product.

The hardware is excellent, capable of very good quality sampling and reproduction if you ignore the dinky little microphone that it comes with. Either feed in sound via a good quality mike, or use your Hi-Fi if you want to exploit the sampler's full potential.

For the home user, the fact that the hardware unit accepts mini-jacks (those used on the Spectrum's cassette lead) is probably not too much of a pain. Anyone with the desire to do more serious work would probably want to install full size audio sockets on the unit, or at the very least buy a couple of converters. For under fifty quid, one can't expect all the bells and whistles to be available, but the provision of knobs to adjust gain and feedback would have been a nice touch and shouldn't have added significantly to the price. As it is you have to fiddle with the pots using a screwdriver.

But enough of this preliminary carping! What can the Datel do?

Well it's all down to the software. Once you set up your cables and computer and are ready to feed sound into and out of the unit, the next step is to load up the accompanying software and start experimenting.

Four programs come on the cassette and the first provides an ideal starting point for some experimentation, providing a menu of options to choose from. You can record a sound into memory - sample it - and then play it back at varying pitches using the keys 1-9. Alternatively you can reverse the sound (play it from end to start) and then play it back over nine pitches. For amusement value there is a draw option, which displays a frequency plot of your sampled sound onto the screen. Amusement value, because you cannot then go on to edit it - but this ain't a twenty five thousand pound Fairlight.

Other menu options allow the sound to be played back with a rising pitch effect, echo, repeated playback and a chopped-off effect is created by a progressively faster repeat. Four different short sounds may be sampled and then played back using the 5, 6, 7 and 8 keys. Not quite Mr Copeland, but four finger drum solos are possible.

All the effects work well, although there is a slight problem with the scaling - the playback keys provide a non-tempered scale which raises the pitch of successive notes by the same amount, which isn't how the real musical scale works. A little annoying to the musical purist.

The second program, keys, allows a sound recorded into memory to be played back using the top two rows of the Spectrum keyboard to emulate a one-octave musical keyboard. You can hop up and down ten octaves, and while it is difficult to contrive to play a tune which spans several octaves, the pitch following was pleasingly accurate. A major deficiency was caused by a looping problem, however. If you press a 'key' down to sustain a note for longer than the sample length, then the note produced is not continuous. There's a pause every time the end of the sampled sound is reached, while the software cycles back to the start again.

The sequencer program allows tunes of up to 1,000 events to be programmed in step time, and edited as desired. Note time, pitch and octave are entered and then the whole tune can be played back using your sampled sound as the basis. In use, the sequencer was a pain to get to grips with - input was slow and a little tedious. Unless care is taken, the program has a habit of failing fatally. Fun, maybe for the masochist musician.

Games Speak allows you to sample up to eight short sounds and then access them from within your own games program. Alternatively, you can store a meaty four second chunk of speech, for instance, which could be neatly incorporated into an adventure perhaps. Not yet of vast commercial potential, as not too many people own Datel Samplers at present, but some interesting speech systems could be written for it, which could be of benefit to the disabled.

For fifty pounds Datel have produced a neat piece of hardware which, in the final analysis, is let down by the software it is supplied with. A little more thought on the echo facility software, for instance, could have provided a repeated echo which gradually fades in volume, or perhaps offered a chorus type effect which would have approached an automatic double tracking facility.

The instructions, which run to four A4 typed sheets, are less than succinct and fail to give any technical information whatsoever. The potential is there, however, for someone prepared to examine the listings of the programs which come with the unit and write some very clever routines for themselves. Pity Datel didn't quite finish the job off....