Before everyone had a thousand soft-samplers in a laptop, you had a rack, a floppy disk, and twelve glorious bits. The Akai S950 is the box that chopped the breaks for half of hip-hop, jungle, and big beat: Fatboy Slim, Dr. Dre, The Bomb Squad, and Future Sound of London all leaned on its gritty, time-stretched, slightly-wrong magic. It samples up to 48kHz, mangles loops with the time-stretch that made it famous, and gives every voice its own output so you can process hits to taste. This one is memory-expanded and ready to ruin your productivity. It doesn't sound clean. That's the entire point.

FEATURES & PROS:

• 12-Bit Character: That crunchy, slightly-degraded grit producers still chase. Cleanliness is overrated.
• Legendary Time-Stretch: The first Akai to stretch samples without changing pitch. The secret sauce behind a thousand breakbeats.
• Memory-Expanded: Boot screen confirms 1536KB (1.5MB) fitted, double the stock 750KB, for longer samples and more of them.
• 8 Individual Outputs: Send every voice to its own channel for separate processing. A mixdown dream.
• Variable Sampling to 48kHz: Higher fidelity than the S900 it replaced, with lower rates on tap when you want it nasty.
• Disk + MIDI: Loads S900 and S1000 libraries and plays nice with any MIDI rig.

AS USED BY

• Fatboy Slim, who leaned on its time-stretch for sub-bass
• The Bomb Squad (Public Enemy's production team)
• Dr. Dre and a generation of hip-hop producers
• Future Sound of London, plus countless jungle and big-beat records

THE WORD: MusicRadar reckons the S950 has aged gracefully and stayed a go-to drum-loop sampler thanks to that time-stretch, the same trick Fatboy Slim leaned on for his sub-bass. Read the review.

SPECIFICATIONS

• Year: 1988
• Type: 12-bit rackmount digital sampler (2U)
• Polyphony: 8 voices
• Sampling: variable 7.5kHz to 48kHz, with time-stretch
• Memory: expanded to 1536KB / 1.5MB installed (S950 maxes at 2.25MB)
• Outputs: 8 individual + stereo mix
• Connectivity: MIDI In/Out/Thru, 3.5 inch floppy disk drive
• Power: IEC mains
• Manual: Akai S950 operator's manual (ManualsLib)

Further reading: S612 to S5000: Which Akai Sampler Do You Actually Want?