AKAI S2000

You always wanted that punchy, bit crushed sound, but never quite got it out of plugins or whatnot. This bitch will do it for you and even better. Although hardware sampling is a thing of the past and using your daw or audio interface to sample is so, so, so, so much more efficient, you just cant get that hardware character. On the upside, they are expandable (fx board, or extra outs, sd floppy emulator, memory) and nowadays they are cheap (got mine for 90$). Only downside i'd say is that the os is wonky at times (os can hang and freeze sometimes) and the screen is ssSmall. That said, love mine.

In conjunction with my Akai MPK-49 this becomes my MPC-2000. Mine has maxed RAM, the 8 output board with S/PDIF, SCSI and an external hard drive. The MESA software is no longer available and was buggy when it used to be supported. The LED is tiny, but fails less often than it's big brother the S3000XL. You can get one for $100 and upgrade it from any of the MPC parts dealers. It's debatable whether or not hardware sampling is still worthwhile in a world where it is honestly much easier and more powerful to do it with software. You sort of need a super special edge case to want to do things this way, but it will load Akai S900, S1000 earlier sampler samples which abound, and the envelopes are very fast and snappy, so unlike many other sluggish samplers, it is well suited to drum hits. It functioned as a breakbeat and sample triggering box for me for many years and these days is mostly not used. I often debate whether I should upgrade it to a SD drive, with chopped and screwed mods, or just sell it, but the once in a blue moon use is still worth the $100 of value it would provide if I sold it, so it sits there awaiting it's next lark.

I love this thing, I've never understood why it got so much hate. It does everything I need it to do and more, I can just sample something into it, crunch it down, and it just sounds amazing, no matter what it is. The interface is a bit dodgy but in the end you just get used to it, it's a matter of adapting to it, I'd say in the end it doesn't take any longer than it would on any other sampler. Anyway, point is this thing is a brilliant sampler for the price, you get cyclic timestretch (along with the fancy shmancy intelligent timestretch), resampling, expandable memory, 44.1k max samperate and more. Personally I'd say these things are pretty much the 950s of today.

beward the scsi card and windows 95 based software... works great for old school tech. i used it for the "Akai mpc sound" on my samples. it works well for that.