Kurzweil K2000R synthesizer with sampling option.
I bought this used from a friend for a lot of money in the mid-nineties. At the time samplers and RAM were expensive, but I really wanted something with more memory and features than my S950. This one's got 16Mb of memory and a 520Mb hard-disk full of sounds. That's nothing these days but ten years ago it was pretty high-end.
Apart from the sampling features, it's also an extremely deep digital synth with lots of waveforms, good filters, built-in effects and loads of interesting ways of mangling sounds, and you can apply all of the synthesis features to your own samples. The instruction manual is almost as thick as a phone book.
The K2000 goes quite a long way beyond the capabilities of the samplers I was used to at the time, and you can program some nice evolving sounds on it, but the truth is that 90% of the time I just use it as a sampler to play drum machine sounds - I have spent some time sampling every drum machine I can get my hands on because I don't really see the point in owning digital drum machines and I don't feel like blowing £600 on a TR808 right now.
I guess the K2000 was surpassed by other instruments like the later e-Mu samplers and the K2500 and so on, and then the computer music revolution made samplers almost obsolete (I recently saw an Akai S1000 in a shop in Tokyo for £10), but it remains a great synth and sampler with very nice sound-quality.
EXAMPLE SOUNDS
The first demo MP3 is the K2000 playing samples from a TR-808 that I borrowed for a few days. The next two are single K2000 sounds with TR-808 samples in the background. All the other sounds are single patches on the K2000 with a little reverb and delay, no other effects.
K2001 - TR-808 drum samples.
K2002 - TB-303 type patch over TR-808 samples.
K2003 - FM bass sound over TR-808 samples.
K2004 - Weird sample and hold.
K2005 - Modulated stringy organ.
K2006 - Last Days S&H.
K2007 - Detuned pad.
K2008 - Accordion strings.
K2009 - Big digital chords.
K2010 - Random sync.
K2011 - Voices.
K2012 - Glass Room sync.
K2013 - Through The Blue preset.
K2014 - Glockenspiel preset.
K2015 -Warm analog pad preset.
K2016 -Synth bass, filter cutoff controlled by velocity, preset drum samples.
LINKS
Josef Rabitz's K2000 page here
K2000 stuff on Kurzweil's own page here
Free K2000 sounds to download here
Sonic State K2000 page here
Synth Zone K2000 links page here
Vintage Synth Explorer K2000 page here
Harmony Central K2000 page here