Akai S3000XL

The Akai S3000XL is a 16-bit professional stereo digital sampler. The instrument has 32 polyphonic voices, and 2 MB of built-in RAM. When the S3000XL was released, it was top of the line.

For adding sounds to the sampler, the S3000XL featured a 3.5" floppy drive that read Akai-formatted floppies, and a SCSI port to link with an external storage device, such as a zip drive a cd reader or an external hard disk for storage of longer, or more samples. The built-in 2 MB of RAM could be upgraded up to 32 with (2x16) SIMM that Akai provided. Iomega Zip drives were very commonly used for storage and backup. This was especially important considering that the device could play back MIDI files to external MIDI devices, thus syncing samples with any number of other MIDI instruments. A great benefit was that during live performance the Akai could take the role of the computer to trigger the other instruments. Other upgrades included various extra cards such as the EB-16 & IB-304f.

The S3000XL had 8 outputs, and two 1/4" phone connector inputs, allowing for the S3000XL to operate as a hard disk recorder. The interface consisted of 32 buttons, eight of which were function keys, three knobs, and a four-key directional pad for navigating the 240x64 display, located in the upper-middle portion of the sampler.