I had worries that the build quality of the MPC1000 would have been sacrificed for reducing the overall cost of production. My fears were based on the Akai Z4/8 which felt cheap and plastic compared to my S5000 (and the screen was tiny too) - in my opinion the Zs were a step backwards for Akai.

Anyway the MPC1000 that I picked up recently is a reassuringly solid unit with a screen that seems to hold the same amount of information as the 2000xl but is much bigger. As has been said in previous reviews the only thing that feels cheap are the data wheel and rec level and master volume wheel. Maybe I don't know a lot about the financial aspects of producing an electronic instrument but how much would it cost to make sturdier wheels Akai? The pads are just as I remember on the MPC2000XL and for any 'heavy handed' users who like to play their MPC with a hammer you can adjust the sensitivity.

The USB, compact flash drive and 5MB internal flash make this unit a joy to use and it is small enough to sit in bed with it on your lap! In fact that's what I did last night - loaded all of the samples I had been using on my S5000 onto the MPC1000 and sequenced them in bed, then saved it all to internal flash. So next time I turn it on there's no messing about - I'm where I left it, that means a lot to me as I feel messing about with zip disks and floppies kills creativity and spontanaity.

The MPC1000 sounds as I expected it to. If you put a punchy kick in it sounds punchy, if you put a phat kick in it sounds phat. There are no dope filters and no mojo filters but 2 good high/low pass and band pass with resonance, the low pass is particularly good for ultra bass!! The real time tuning and attack/decay controls are very useful for altering drums sounds. The internal mixer is well implemented too with levels, pans and sends for each individual pad, so you can just use the master outs if you wish to mix internally. I upgraded the OS to 1.06 and there have been no problems, if I was a potential buyer I wouldn't worry about all talk of crashes and such it seems stable to me.

I can't find a lot to fault the MPC apart from the flash card and internal preset sounds, they seem to be directed at a specific market and are not very versatile, but people who buy machines for their presets will never get the best out of them. I kept about 3 of them from the card. The plastic buttons as I mentioned before are rubbish. One final gripe is that the outputs seem to distort at a lower level than my S5000, but I won't be able to verify that until I've hooked it up with a mixer.

So to summarise - the features on this are unbeatable at the price. I can only find minor things wrong with it like the cheap buttons. So for £600 new and about £400 second hand you can't go wrong with it, the nearest competition is perhaps the Yamaha RS7000 and I've never used that.