MY AKAI sampler Review
img000016 I got my AKAI S2000 2 years ago. It was very cheap because the person I bought it from was not able to handle it. His uncle gave it to him as a birthday present. Luckily he didn't knew the prices for that kind of hardware, so I paid less. I took one year to study the manual but was not able to get the multi trimble mode working.
It was very frustrating, and I only got a single sound midi playing. In that time my sampler was staying with a friend, because we were sampling his drumcomputers.
I found that the sound of the sampler and drumcomp where likely of the same sound quality !!! When I had my S2000 at home I really had it quick working in multi mode. I designed my samplesets in a way I use my synthesizer. With a standard pack of controllers and key sensitivity. But still I'm not satisfied with the results. Two things still don't work : a good key sensitivity and a whole range of the modulation wheel. I hope I will work that out later.
Expansion board for AKAI S2000 : IB-208P I also bought myself an expansion board with 8-channel analogue output and digital 'coax' in/out. I found it important to work with digital to digital sampling, because you will have no dynamic loss.
The sample will stay exactly the same as on the cd. But first I had to find out that this expansion board had another kind of SP-DIF connector than my cd player.
img00064 You have two kinds of SP-DIF connectors :
the coax one, looks like a cinch connector and the optical one. The optical one works with a light signal and therefore you need a special fibreglass cable. The expansion board has a coax SP-DIF and my cd player had a optical connector, so I sold my cd player and bought a Philips cd player, because of the superb quality and it has a (standard) coax SP-DIF connector. Now I was ready to sample and a new world opened-up for me. I found out that digital sampling with a cd player with coax out and my digital input on my s2000 is the best way to sample, because there is no loss of digital information. If you stream audio cd's with your PC you will lose data about 10 to 15%. So this is the only way to make your perfect samples. For more info about digital sampling see dig_dig.txt.
I'm very fond of my sampler and I know that it's better to have some real hardware than put some SoundCards in your computer, and work with software samplers. It makes it real slower and sometimes the midi routings are a real mess.
Also the software is a real problem, it is not professional and works unfriendly. So most of the time you must find out how it can work, with maybe the possibility that it won't. For me Steinberg is the only one that works with real professional software to create your own songs, but you need a real fast computer for it. So don't try stuff on your PC that you do with your hardware sampler. .... MNX2010 Feb'03.