Yamaha TX16W 12-bit 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 systems 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 comunity 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!

A key advantage between the Yamaha operating system and the Typhoon operating system is the disk formating.  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 formating which means that modern PC's will corrupt any Yamaha TX16W disk put into them.  So my advice is don't do this!.  Where as 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 convered back to the original Yamaha TX16W format.  If you search the various forums you can find many of these original original samples released by Yamaha and other sound developers like Sound Source Unlimited. 

This sampler samples at 12-bit resoltion.  It shipped with 1.5Mb of RAM, that could be expanded to 6Mb using either Yamaha sanctioned RAM or various after market sources.  By todays standards where we are use to buying a computer with 16Gb of memory, 6Mb is rather small.  But in 1988 1.5Mb was masive.

The basic specification of this sampler was 16 note operation and