Perhaps this thread should be moved over to Keyboard/MIDI. Having said that, I am also looking for a decent sampler. I want one with large drum pads on it. Not a rackmount. I am leaning towards an AKAI because everyone else seems to like them, but I am really a fan of a lot of Yamahas stuff. I don't know if they make a drum pad version.

Hi,

I use an AKAI S5000 for a while and it's a very good gear. The bad thing is that it doesn't have any internal memory when you shut down your gear, you lose everything or you must use an external ZIP or storage gear.
Nicolas S.

Korg Electribe•S. Get thee to a gear store and demo it, farewell. It changed my life.

I'm using S5000 and S6000. After upgrading them with USB cards and using ak.Sys software I've realized that I don't need S6000's extra features at all.
My choice would be S5000 with USB card/ak.Sys and a hard disk. You can use an external or internal SCSI disk or an internal IDE with Akai's SCSI-to-IDE adapter.

I think I'd make my decision based on the libraries that are natively available for the format I am considering.

That is, unless you are a sampling "purist" and are "sampling" more often than "playing back sounds".

Hi Mark,

I'm using an S5000 with the ak.Sys/USB combo, and it's pretty rockin'. Haven't checked out the Yamaha, but I gotta say, this is by far the coolest sampling setup I've ever had. The computer front-end with the sampler (with ak.Sys) makes for an awesome combo. Sample editing, storage, organization, etc. are all light years beyond any other hardware sampler I've seen (cuz it all runs on the PC). In fact I'm in the process of selling off my Roland and Emu samplers.

Good luck,

-e

The yamaha seems more catered to the electronic musician. Its got cool effects, probably the best filters on a sampler, and it has interesting editing features for messing up loops. If you've seen other yamaha products like the su700, or rm1x you'll get the idea, though on the a5000 things are realised on a higher more pro caliber.

The akai is designed to seamlessly interact with your computer daw. Its native file format is wav, and it holds more memory. If your doing sound design, or soundtracks with big samples it looks nice.This seems like its a standard in most studio's, but I dont think its as "fun" as the yamaha.

Depending upon how deep the pockets anothe consideration is that the yamaha comes with quite a few sample cd's in the box. But Ive heard its scsi loading times are excruciatingly slow, like where an s5000 would take 5 minutes, the a5000 takes 15, but if the samples are on a hd, or orb drive thats not so big of a deal.

I think both samplers play wav files as well as many other formats.

Actually, the insanely slow loading times make no difference whether you are loading from CD or HD.