Yamaha TX16W The 12-bit 1980's Sampler

The Yamaha TX16W is a 2U rack sampler released by Yamaha in 1988.

At the point of powering up the sampler you had to load an operating system from disk.  This was not unusual for samplers that were released around this time.  And I am thinking specifically about the Ensoniq EPS-16 Plus, Roland S-50 and Roland S-750 which are other samplers in my collection release about the same timeframe.  In 1988 there was a memory shortage and 1Mb of RAM in a PC could cost up to £300.  Giving this instrument a cost of £2,000 when new.

Yamaha did not do themselves any favours with the musical community when they designed the operating system for this synthesiser.  There were two versions of the operating system released for the Yamaha TX16W.  The base release known as Version 1 and Version 2.1 being released in September 1988.

Between version 1 and version 2.1 Yamaha only really implemented minor bug fixes and did little to fix the convoluted user interface that many musicians complained about.  Although I have discovered that between version 1 and version 2.1 Yamaha did move features about e.g. in version 1 disk format is Utility>4 and in version 2.1 format is Utility>6.

However, many users moved off the Yamaha operating system for the Typhoon operating system developed by NuEdge.  Of course, the two operating systems are incompatible requiring samples created in the Yamaha operating system to be converted to the Typhoon operating system.  However, there was no way to go the other way!  But then if you have switched to Typhoon, why would you?

A key differentiator between the Yamaha operating system and the Typhoon operating system is the disk file operating system.  Yamaha used a version of FAT12 which was common in the early PC market.  I said a version as Yamaha did something strange with sector 1 during the formatting which means that modern PC's will corrupt any Yamaha TX16W disk put into them.  So, my advice is don't do this!  Whereas the Typhoon operating system formatted the disk with a standard FAT12 that could be read by a PC without being corrupted.

As stated above samples saved using Typhoon cannot be converted back to the original Yamaha TX16W format.  If you search the various forums, you can find many of these original samples released by Yamaha and other sound developers like Sound Source Unlimited.  Writing these samples to disk so that your Yamaha TX16W can read them can be a challenge.

This sampler samples at 12-bit resolution.  It shipped with 1.5Mb of RAM, that could be expanded to 6Mb using either Yamaha sanctioned RAM or various after market sources.  By today’s standards where we are used to buying a computer with 16Gb of base memory for a £300 - £500, 6Mb is rather small.  But in 1988 1.5Mb was massive.

After switching on the Yamaha TX16W, the operating system had to be loaded from a 720Kb floppy disk.  The same 720Kb disks are used to load samples into the sampler and save samples created on the sampler.  Some larger samples require multiple disks to store them. The sampler can only support a 720Kb floppy disk format and not the larger 1.44Mb format.  Disks normally take about a minute to load the data on them into the memory.

Even at 60 seconds load time plus the associated disk change and setup activities, the Yamaha TX16W was difficult to use in live situations.

Other than memory there was no scope to expand the sampler, although there was a good trick to use two Yamaha TX16W's together. One would be set up to play odd keys and the other set to play even keys.  The theory was this would double the polyphony of the sampler.  Given the way musicians play the polyphony is expanded but not necessarily doubled.

I have acquired 2 of these samplers, both with the full complement of RAM.  Why 2?  I was approached by the former owners for both instruments.  The second came with a huge sample library and the former owner wouldn't split the deal, So it was sampler plus sample library or no deal.  To be honest I am still undecided whether to retain two units as I only need one for the music that I create.

I mentioned above that I acquired a large sample library with one of the samplers.  I have also been gifted or acquired additional disks for the Yamaha TX16W over the years that I have owned these samplers.  The issue with a lot of these disks is that they are, in 2025, 35 or more years old.  Which means the disk media is starting to degrade.

So, I started a mission to preserve these disks and have created a process to archive the disks to a storage system.  I have also created a mechanism to reproduce them should the media fail.