Roland S-50

The Roland S-50 is a 61-key 12-bit sampler keyboard produced by the Roland Corporation in 1986. It featured a 3.5-inch DSDD floppy disk drive and had external CRT monitor support to facilitate editing of samples. It could hold up to 32 samples. A rack-mounted version was also available, which featured expanded memory.^[2]

Roland S-50
Roland S-50
Manufacturer	Roland Corporation
Dates	1986 - 1987
Price	£2195 UK $2695 US
Technical specifications
Polyphony	16
Timbrality	4 parts
LFO	Yes
Synthesis type	Samples
Filter	Low-pass, hi-pass digital filters
Aftertouch expression	Yes
Velocity expression	Yes
Storage memory	RAM (512K)[1]
Effects	no
Input/output
Keyboard	61 keys weighted
Left-hand control	pitch-bend and modulation wheels, volume, record level, controller / bend range sliders.

Sample rate

15 to 30 kHz variable sampling rates at a 12-bit resolution, (28.8 seconds and 14.4 seconds respectively) The samples can also be saved to disk (3.5-inch DSDD floppy disk drive).^[3]

S-550

DT-100 Digitizer Tablet

A rack-mountable version was released in 1987,^[4] which also had twice the sample memory (1.5 Mb) and time-variant filters. A less feature-rich version of the S-550 was also available as the S-330. Both can support the DT-100 Digitizer Tablet and an external computer monitor for visual manipulation of the samples on screen.