When Roland released the new 404 in the fall of 2021, we were still at the end of the pandemic fog, where any new music hardware automatically became a monetary success. Honestly, who took it for anything other than a money grab?
I remember how pissed off I was when I realized that my new SP-404 MK2 did not support the SD card I bought for it: initially, the maximum supported size was 32 GB.
Fast forward to 2024: not only have the card size limitations been resolved via firmware updates (since version 3, we can save up to 1 TB of materials). New features and improvements have been regularly added: TR-REC recording mode, post-record quantization, crazy performance effects, etc.
And with the release of firmware 4.04 on 24-04-04 – the 404 transcended being a sampler. With the newly added Sound Generator, it’s a synth with support for 15 different waveforms.