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I recently got the A3000 to act as my main studio sampler. I'll have to say that I think the Yamaha A series of samplers are the best out there. The A3000 is a good price, and has a great deal of features for the money. The OS is a little different than EMU/AKAI samplers, but after a day or two I was navigating through the A3000 with no problem.
Version 2.0 of the A3000 is a MUST if you want to use this sampler with full potential. The power of the A3000 is incredible when you have many filter types to choose from, and powerful effects. I believe that A3000 filters are aggresive, but are fat sounding. The ability to select Q width and gain can make you change the filters in all kinds of ways. Although there have been comments on what effects sound "not so great", I personally think they can be used with careful tweaking of parameters. The majority of effects are great sounding with default settings IMHO though. The screen of the A3000 is not the best if you want to do waveform editing (no graphical editing), but I think it's good to practice using your ears to get a good attack for your sample. Unfortunetly, sounds that "sweep" in, or build up will probably be best tweaked in your PC. You could also just use your sequencer to find where it should start fading in.
The A3000 is also great for making new sounds. It is built very much like a synthesizer, and can allow you to make a sample into a dynamic instrument using LFO, ADSR, ADSR filter...even layering. One of the biggest downfalls about the a3000 is that the knobs can turn most people off to it. Apparently it's knobs are sensed via optical sensors, and turning the knobs quickly results in moving the opposite way. Sometimes knob movements don't work at all! My suggestion is to move the knobs smoothly, while holding the knob firmly. Twist your whole hand with the knob rather than using just your fingers, and jiggling knob all around. This will confuse the sensors less, and has given me good results thus far. Also be wary of the SCSI speed in which people have not gotten great results out of. I suggest that you turn off "load while playing" option, which I believe is somewhere under UTILITY menus. This slows down your load/save speed a lot.
I think the A3000 is a great sampler for the money, and I recommend any of the A series samplers over the other samplers out there. Yamaha fixed a lot of problems with version 2.0, and included a lot of neat features. If you can afford the A4000/5000, then you can have all this power with graphic editing if that one of your bigs (not to mention the more effects).
peace
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