Being the closet electronics nerd I am, I ventured over to Machine Project in Echo Park (that's an urban mecca of hip halfway between Silverlake and downtown, for you non-Los Angeles dwellers) Sunday afternoon for a lecture/demonstration of DIY'er Todd Bailey's Where's The Party At 8-bit sampler (aka WTPA). Todd's quite a character- your textbook electronics nerd but without the condescending "nerd hubris". He gave an excellent lecture about the nuts and bolts of basic sampling and the how's and why's of what makes old-school samplers sound, in his words, "crusty". This carried over to his WTPA sampler kit which exists to capitalize on the crusty sound, including real-time controls sample rate, bit depth and other controls for instant sound destruction (in a good way!). Much of the motivation for WTPA was getting the circuit-bending guys away from their overpriced Speak 'n' Spells and into learning about gear while offering far more functionality. Todd's PCB kit lets anyone with basic soldering and electronic construction skills build their own basic 8-bit sampler for a minimum investment, and the heavy lifting of programming the ATMEGA controller is all done for you- the chip comes with the OS already loaded (which BTW, is all open source C if any of you are that kind of adventerous- I ain't!). It also includes MIDI to make it play nice with the outside world. Nice work... all the info here.