Don't take any notice of the list prices for Kurzweil kit, there are shops that sell them at a fair price - believe me! (Does £1500 for a K2500R with sample option sound fair? I think that the list price is up to £1000 ontop of that!).

Derek - "individual settings for each sample, hows that? i know a slightly overrated sampler that cant do even that" - The answer is to assign individual samples to their own Layer - if you have multiple samples on the *same* Layer you lose the ability to assign individual samples to *different* filter types as all samples within the same Layer share the same DSP configuration and therefore the same filter, EQ, waveshaper etc setting. This is easily overcome by assigning individual samples to their own layer within a "Drum Channel" (a 32 layer program) - that's the limitation - the K2000 only has one Drum Channel as standard, the K2500 has 8 and on the K2600 all 16 MIDI channels are Drum Channels (by the way, non-Drum Channels are 3 layer programs). The limitation is that there is a maximum of 32 samples that can have different filter set-ups per Program (per MIDI channel) - not an entire keyboard of samples as can be done with the E-mu. However, the good news is that this means that you can have 32 layers of samples with the additional possibility of each layer having a different sample on each key! Flexible, but not that useful - more of a synth feature than a sampler requirement.

Just another thing regarding the Emulator and ESI relationship, apparently one of the first things to be "cost cut" when Akai created the MPC2000 were the higher quality A to D convertors as used in the MPC3000, did E-mu do the same or are the ESIs really that close (hardware wise) to the Emulator 4? Just wondering.

OK, I was in a bad mood, I'll give the E6400 3 out of 5, basically as the EIV is better (which would get 4 out of 5) and the K2500/2600 would get 5 - All Akai's get 1.

I said it sounds KINDA the same cos the ultras have higher quality DACS. Besides which e-mu r bringing out the esi-2000 soon which dont seem much different than 4K so u wont have 2 buy a 5K if u want the e-mu warmth, just buy a really ugly sampler instead.

E-mu samplers sound wise are the best made today, akai's evern the 5k and 6k can't hold a candle to the sound of any E4 series sampler, it's just that easy. Yamaha's SU and A3000 both are nice as well but still lack the overall sound quality you'll find in an E-mu. This balogana about combining DCO's and distortion and the rest of that pap, sounds to me you need to be a scientist rather than a musician make music not grandiose statements that simply have no bearing on this discussion whatsoever. Yes I know Kurzweil's are nice too, just for the price they fetch it's simply not worth it, so you can do all these little tricks on a Kurzweil but is really woth another $1 to $2k to me, well hell no..

No disrespect intended, just seems to me we just don't need another post saying it doesn't do this it doesn't do that -- which is comparing apples to oranges (based on price alone) -- bottom line E-mu samplers are the best made, with the best OS going right now since it's actually written by an American (gasp!), so things are clear and relatively straight foward especially in comparison to those god awful white akai samplers.

Get one, you'll see what I mean..

-nubey