Akai is up to rev 1.30 on their operating system and as expected they've dealt with all of the bug/issues/complaints I've heard raised. V1.30 also adds significant funtionality also. Akai have extensive PDF's detailing each OS version's additional features and bug fixes. Only a handfull of manufacturers are brave enough to admit and list all their prior mistakes, so I have to give Akai full marks for handing things on the OS end after a shaky start. I've certainly got no reliability complaints.

In my orignal post I wrote that maybe Emu would come out with an E5 that meets the S6000 specs. Well they did announce the E5, except that it's a reboxing of the E4 hardware.. so maybe the E6 will see them using a non-propriatary disk format.

Yamaha have announced a new super duper sampler too, but again no Fat32 disk support. Oh well, I guess being able to make custom cd libraries with your cd-r isn't a priority to most ppl, but I like the idea personally. That and also running Norton Utilities on my samplers HD every now and then to make sure things are ok.

So over a year later, there seems to be nothing in sight that will equal the functionality of the Akai samplers. If you're in the market for a good hardware sampler, the S6000 and S5000 are as good as they get, in the present and in the foreseeable future.

if you want a sampler that sounds great and has an awesome interface, get the akai. it's still the best sounding sampler for drums...tight and punchy. i have a 20 foot cord attached to the removable screen--very nice. let's see you try and do that on any other sampler. and expandable to 256 megs of ram which is massive for my purposes--i make minimal techno and experimental electronic music. of course if you're trying to replicate a full orchestra and a grand piano you can run out of ram quickly. then again you can use the virtual sample feature, which lets the akai play samples only limited by the size of the hard drive. i don't know if any other sampler has this feature, but it makes the akai somewhat giga-sampler-esque.

also have the eb20 effects processor installed. not the greatest sounding effects, but i didn't expect eventide quality for $320. that aside, having integrated effects in the multis is very convenient and i'm glad i have it.

next up is buying the adat expansion so that i can hook it up to the yamaha 01v. this would be a killer setup.

os 1.3 is stable but there are still some missing features. akai needs to implement pointers to samples instead of having multiple copies of the same sample in multis. and more features in managing samples would be nice. right now i'm using windows explorer to manage the internal hard drive in my s6000 so it's workable. and portamento needs to be added, but i haven't been hurting too much from this omission in the OS.

one thing i want is an emu-like modulation matrix. but i may just buy an emu for that purpose. i think akai would clean up the market if they would implement this...then the emu wouldn't have any real advantages over the akai.

since the OS is still "unfinished" i'm gonna give the s6000 a 3 for now. hopefully akai will start working on some needed features instead of simply putting out fires in the OS during 2000.