> The originals sound better. The aliasing provides a crunchiness and sharpness to the final output that drives emotional energy.

In the mid-1980s the first really affordable sampler was the Ensoniq Mirage, which used the Bob Yannes-designed ES5503 DOC (Digital Oscillator Chip) to generate its waveforms. It played back 8-bit samples and used a fairly simple phase accumulator that didn't do any form of interpolation (I don't count "leftmost neighbour" as interpolation). Particularly when you pitch it down, you get a rough, clanky, gritty "whine" to samples, that the analogue filters didn't necessarily do a lot to remove.

Later on they released the EPS which had 13-bit sampling. Why 13-bit? I don't know, I guess because the Emulator I and II used 8-bit samples but μ-law coding, giving effectively 13-bit equivalent resolution. It also used linear interpolation to smooth the "jumps" between samples, and even if you loaded in and converted a Mirage disk the "graininess" when you pitched things down was gone.

I'm currently writing some code to play back Mirage samples from disk images, and I've actually added a linear interpolator to it. Some things sound better with it, some things sound worse. I think I'll make it a front panel control, so you can turn it on and off as you want.