Dragon of Captain & Tennille, because he had been a loyal E-mu modular system owner for a long time before that. However, Wonder was more famous. In 1982, the Emulator was updated to include a VCA envelope generator and a simple sequencer, and the price was lowered. Approximately 500 units were sold before the unit was discontinued in early 1984. Other prominent users of the original E-mu Emulator were New Order, Tangerine Dream and Genesis, and it was among the many groundbreaking instruments used in the production of Michael Jackson's Thriller album. Composer and Writer David Frank of The System used the original Emulator on his productions from Sweat to Don't Disturb this Groove. The Residents, who had gotten the fifth Emulator to ever be produced, used the instrument extensively on their album The Tunes of Two Cities. Emulator II Released commercially in 1984 to huge acclaim, the Emulator II (or EII) was E-mu's second sampler. Like the original Emulator, it was an 8-bit sampler, however it had superior fidelity to the Emulator due to the use of digital companding and a 27.7 kHz sample rate. It also allowed more flexibility in editing and shaping sounds, as resonant analog filters were added. The EII also had vastly better real time control. It was priced similarly to the original Emulator, at US$7,995 for a regular model, and $9,995 for a 'plus' model featuring extra sample memory. Several upgrades, including a second floppy drive, a 20 MB hard drive, and a 512K memory upgrade were also available. Despite its price tag it was still considered very good value compared to the Fairlight CMI Series II, which, when first released, was priced at $30,000. The Emulator II has a unique sound due to its DPCM mu-255 companding, divider-based variable sample-rate principle and analog output stages featuring SSM2045 24 dB/oct analogue four-pole low-pass resonant filters. Equivalent output stages in modern samplers perform similar functions purely in the digital domain, and aficionados of the sound of analogue electronics argue that some of this analogue 'magic' is lost. Several highly respected OEM and third party sample libraries were developed for the Emulator II, including a multitude of high quality orchestral sounds. Many of the EII's original library sounds were sampled from the more expensive Fairlight and Synclavier workstations (the Fairlight's famous "Sarrar/Arr1" choir sample is called "DigiVcs" in the E-mu library). This can cause confusion when