https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/1j0slcv/wanted_hisoft_aura_sampler/
created by cim_drex on 01/03/2025 at 05:49 UTC
1 upvotes, 3 top-level comments (showing 3)
Hi, I’m interested in acquiring a Hisoft Aura sampler.
Does anybody have a unit they’re looking to sell, if so DM me!
Cheers
Comment by danby at 01/03/2025 at 10:16 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Worth asking in the wanted hardware section over at amibay
Comment by multioptional at 02/03/2025 at 00:44 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I wonder, if they still sell, at which price. I remember dreaming of owning one, but it was always extremely expensive... and then cheap 2nd gen hardware samplers flooded the market because harddisk recording took off.
Is the Aura compatible with an accelerator card? 16 bit + lots of ram from a nice blizzard seems like a good fantasy.
Comment by GwanTheSwans at 02/03/2025 at 02:30 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/aura
That ...kind of sounds like it mightn't actually playback out in 16-bit?
Can it actually playback at 16-bit or digitize at 16-bit but *only* pass through the Paula 8-bit/pseudo-14-bit sound?
If it's 16-bit sound in general you're after rather than the pcmcia aura device specifically for reasons - it just does seem likely to be a pretty rare thing?
There were definitely various other full bidirectionally 16-bit sound cards for Amigas though, though admittedly mostly for big-box / tower-converted with zorro slots I suppose.
I never actually got one at the time though certainly do remember desiring them. Good ol' cheap 8-bit parport sampler and paula 8-bit out was all I had back then though.
Late era there were apparently a couple of 16-bit ones that actually fitted to the A1200 clock port (somehow, naively seems a lot to pump through the clock port but maybe it worked fine).
1: http://amiga.resource.cx/dir/audio
Maybe there's some of those floating about amibay/ebay too,
2: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/prelude1200
3: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/delfina1200
And there are some weird modern retro A1200 accelerators with onboard 16-bit sound cards builtin as it were, though they're also ...not cheap.
I don't think the pistorm arm accelerators can act as a 16-bit sound card for the Amiga as yet even though it should be possible in principle on them, though could be out of date there, it could be coming https://github.com/michalsc/Emu68-tools/issues/3[6]
4: https://www.amibay.com/threads/trinity-1240-1260-accelerator-released.2448987/
5: https://www.apollo-computer.com/icedrakev4.php
6: https://github.com/michalsc/Emu68-tools/issues/3
Presumably not what you want if you're building out some authentic old hardware for crunchy retro audio (any emulation audio glitching can be super annoying compared to real silicon, granted, though modern emulators have got pretty good), but WinUAE and Amiberry can also emulate a 16-bit Amiga sound card (and a connected MT32 for midi!)
There are presumably old second-hand and modern retro simple Amiga 8-bit parport samplers out there, could also consider grabbing one of those in the meantime if you haven't already, if kitting out some sort of A1200 hardware retro music station.
This modern retro 8-bit parport unit only seems to be mono
but there definitely were a few parport ones that would do 8-bit stereo too at the time (though a lot of the time I suppose you *wanted* just mono for use in tracking, a lot of sources were stereo, so still useful for initial sampling to get both at once)
7: https://amiga68k.com/?product=amiga-mono-audio-sampler-oas
8: https://github.com/echolevel/open-amiga-sampler