another looper not on the site

[michael sintros <mbsintros@yahoo.com>]

it occured to me i should make people aware of the
existence of yet another piece of loop gear.  i'm
speaking of the pyle pdsp850 phrase sampler.  this
little unit i picked up online knowing nothing about
it except what it claimed to be able to do.  they go
for around $100 new.  it's a somewhat thin rackmount
unit and is basically a very simple dj phrase sampler.
 you've got a few different banks to choose from which
give you different amounts of time to deal with
(probably their way of crudely managing memory on this
p.o.s.).  according to the tools of the trade site
list, this would fall under the category of not being
a true looper, since it does not allow you to hit one
button to record and another to stop recording and
immediately initiate playback.  in addition to the
buttons to select a memory location, there are a few
other buttons such as 'read' and 'write'.  to sample,
make sure the 'read' is lit up and then hit the record
button and it'll start recording, then hit the button
again to stop.  then you've got to hit the 'write'
button, after which you can hit the same record/play
button to play or stop the playing loop.  it also has
a knob for controlling the speed of the loop just as
on a tape machine or record player.  the range is not
that great, maybe about half an octave in either
direction.  you can crank the knob all the way in one
direction to record fast and then turn it all the
other direction to get a greater decrease in pitch
then if you had started with the knob at the middle
point.  kind of nice.  main problem with this baby is
that the sound quality coming out of it SUCKS!  it
seems that levels that are already well optimized such
as if you have a cd player plugged right into it
usually don't come out sounding too bad, just a bit
grainy.  but if your input signal is even a little bit
soft, it seems like this thing really mangles it.  the
knobs that control input and output volume also don't
seem to behave as espected.  for instance, put the
input level way down to avoid clipping (which is easy
with this thing), you'll have to turn the output knob
up to compensate for that.  so record a loop then play
it back.  it will come out very very loud.  it's as
though there is an automatic normalization process
that happens to the loop when it is stored, because i
would expect the loop to come out sounding as loud as
it did when i was playing through the unit.  or the
input and output volumes affect the throughput and the
stored loops differently, which is retarded.  

anybody else ever been unfortunate enough to buy one
of these?  if so, anything you'd recommend to make it
more usable?  i never use it anymore because it's too
noisey.  if anyone is curious and wants to try one
out, i would be willing to sell mine at a rather low
price, since i know i have not exactly given a rave
review of it.  but one man's garbage is another man's
... aesthetically pleasing garbage.  

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