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Akai MPC
Akai · 1988
The MPC60 redefined beat-making by collapsing sampling, sequencing, and performance into one hardware instrument. Its strength is immediacy. Its weakness is inflexibility.
On audio.briefs
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Akai S1000
Akai · 1988
The Akai S1000 was a 16-bit stereo digital sampler released in 1988. It offered CD-quality sampling, 24-bit internal processing, digital filters, effects routing, and early timestretching. It read CD-ROMs and wrote to SCSI hard disks. Its timestretching was crude but sonically distinctive—used on 'Higher State of Consciousness' and 'RipGroove'. It displaced the S900 as the studio standard.