Bruh, you had better not be lying about the D-Beam, cause if I don't get laid after buying one of these, I'm blaming you and the Roland Video Manual bloke!
There was another coment in there which went something like ...
"The decsion is yours, grasshopper, so choose wisely!"
Well what can I say?
I saw a "Mint-In-Box" original going for £295 and snapped it up without hesitation. Unfortunately for Girru, me being known as "The Donkey" here in Blackpool isn't just due to the size of my penis, it's also due to me being a great Gunslinger, allowing me to pull the trigger just before Girru did (sorry Girru)!
@Girru
Glad to hear your SP-808 arrived safely and in one piece, and I hear you, I wouldn't use Hermes either, not even with a gun to my head.
I felt really bad after buying it and then seeing your post shortly after, lol. If it's any consolation it's not actually "Mint", in fact the seller advertised it as "Near-Mint", and there's unfortunately a noticable scratch on the wrist-rest that can not be seen in the photos so to hazard a guess I'm guessing it got done when he was packing it up, which is extra unfortunate since he clearly went to great lengths to pack it well.
Other than that it's a new machine, has the patina of a new unit, no tarnishing, no shiny patches, no discoloration, perfect display, and the encoder and pots feel like it just came out of the box for the first time. Damn shame about that scratch though ... DAMN!!!
This is why I usually avoid buying second-hand gear, especially on ebay, but in this case the scratch doesn't matter as it's on a part of the body that I intend to remove/cutomise anyway. I'm planning to give it an old-school boutique look, and will be replacing that scratched part with either a padded leather insert, or a chunk of piano-polished burl walnut (like you'd see on the dashboard of a Rover SD1 Vanden Plas). Gonna add some classy knobs and custom chromed parts to it as well. I'm good at doing stuff like that and to factory standards, so believe me it'll look sexy as hell, decadent and very bling - like a gigolo's penthouse!
It's worth doing because it's an original SP-808, and that means it was the original flagship of Roland's SP line - makes it special.
That's a way off though, I need to move out of this flat into a house before I can do stuff like that, so it's not a priority. The main thing is I have one now and I'm damn glad I bought it. My appreciation goes out to Danswift and TGN for their gushings, without which, I wouldn't have even given it a second look.
As for Vari-Pitch, what can I say, I tried it for the first time last night and it is indeed a global sampling-rate adjuster! I'm absolutely amazed at how nice it feels to adjust, how smooth it is, but the icing on the cake was when I realised that even when you monitor a live incoming signal, you can adjust the Vari-Pitch and actually hear what it's doing to the sound quality even before you sample it (just wait until Zindan gets to experience that, he'll be in his fucking element), it's perfect and it's something I've always wanted to see in a sampler.
The only negative thing I have to say about the SP-808 so far is that I'm not entirely convinced that hitting start and stop on a separate pad to what you're actually sampling to is as intuiative as sampling on the 404. I also don't like the message that pops up after sampling telling me to check the result. I'm wondering now if there is an option to switch that warning off because surely they don't think the user needs to know about that every time they sample something.
So my initial imression is that it's awesome (and it absolutely is a keeper), but unless there are settings to change the behaviour, the sampling feels a little more convoluted than on the 404. The 404 felt more immediate to me in that regard from what I remember of it.
Speaking of the 404 though, one thing for certain is that these pads are much nicer to use than on the 404, they feel kinda softer, less travel in them and just way more pleasing to press.
Haven't tried the synth yet, apparently I need to order a MIDI cable to run it from MIDI OUT to MIDI IN so that I can play it from the pads. That's another thing I don't like but no biggie, it's just a cable running from MIDI OUT to MIDI IN therefore triggering itself.
Regards the Zip drive, I'm not exaggerating when I say that I am astonished how good it is. The noise it makes is I suppose equivalent to one of those weedy little fans on a laptop or something, but the performance it top-notch and I'm buggered if I can even detect any lag whatsoever. I can do a sort of 'rat-a-tat-tat' using two fingers on a single pad and it fires flawlessly, without delay and without getting any disk message!
Occasionally I get new comments, asking for updates (and I think just today a simple “YES PLEASE”) but they’re probably waiting to bite the bullet until I confirm it’s fine.