Not a lot of people know this but...
There is actually another incarnation of the SP-808/EX, the mysterious and rarely seen Edirol A6. The A6 is primarily intended for video post-production work and as such uses slightly different terminology: samples become clips , songs become projects and so on, but physically it is pretty much the same as the 808/EX. It is worth noting that the A6 includes some interesting refinements and differences.
Top of the list is the inclusion of a 2Gb internal IDE hard drive (upgradeable to hefty 16Gb) in place of the lowly 808/EX Zip drive. This allows stereo recording and sampling in excess of nine hours and, I would imagine, none of those annoying ‘Drive Too Busy’ error messages caused by the slow 100Mb Zip. The internal 4-track stereo recorder also borrows a useful feature from the Roland VS multitrackers, it can record 4 physical stereo tracks and 32 virtual tracks. Track editing and sampling is the same as the 808/EX and although the effects bank doesn’t include a Virtual Analogue Synth it does include a Voice Transformer and many other SP-808 effects. Expansion options differ too, with an optional SI-80SP board: offering LANC and EDIT E for frame accurate video sync and the A6-OP1: supplying XLR in/out, digital in/out and SCSI, which by the way, doesn’t impose any of the frustrating Zip only restrictions of the SP808/EX.
Judging from some of the SP808 discussion groups I’m not the first to wonder why Roland decided not to include some of the best A6 features (flexible HD options and virtual tracks) into the new SP-808EX. Roll on the SP-909."
