Roland S-220 Digital Sampler Rack Unit

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The S-220 Digital Sampler Rack was launched in 1988 as a counterpart to the S-10 Digital Sampler Keyboard. The two devices are built identically. In February 1987, the S-220 was announced under the name MKS-200, but in production all models were called S-220.

The Roland S-220 Digital Sampler is a 16-voice sampler module in 19-inch format with 2U and built-in 2.8-inch floppy disc drive (Quick Disk Format, QD for short). It samples with 12bit and either 15 or 30kHz, but already has a 16-bit A/D converter. The internal memory of 256kB is divided into 4 banks of 64kb each, so that all samples together can be a maximum of 4.4 seconds long, approx. 1.1 seconds per bank. To record a ‘long’ sample, you can combine two banks. The samples can be edited in the device, provided with a dynamic envelope and looped. The S-220 reads the QuickDisks from the S-10 and MKS-100, so it is data-compatible with the L-100 series. It works in MIDI mono mode, whereby up to 8 consecutive channels can be used, or up to 4-fold multitimbral in poly mode. (Source: Rolandmuseum)