Samplers | Akai S900 (1986)

Just showing off that tasty s900 filter! Sequenced with an mpc 200 classic. All sounds coming from the s900 and sounding crunchtastic!

The S612 12-bit digital sampler in 1985, was the first in a series of (relatively) affordable samplers already in 19-inch studio-rack format but in black color. It held only a single sample at a time, which was loaded into memory via a separate disk drive utilizing Quick Disk 2.8-inch floppy disks. The maximum sample time at the highest quality sampling rate (32 kHz) was one second.


The introduction of a "professional" range of digital samplers began with the 12-bit S900 in 1986, followed by the X7000 keyboard sampler in 1986,[14] and the S700 rack-mount version in 1987. Unlike the single-sample S612, however, they allowed the use of six active samples at once, had a built-in disk drive and could be extended with six individual outputs via cable and a flash memory extension which added another six samples to the memory for multisample playback. The S700/X7000 sampler series were light-grey colored, which didn't change throughout the whole "professional" range of Akai samplers.


The 16-bit Akai S1000 followed in 1988. The latter was replaced by the S3000 series in 1992-1995, which notably featured a writeable CD-ROM (on S3000CD) and hard disk recording (on S3000i), and was followed by the S5000 and S6000.


Akai