The bigger brother of the S-330 and Roland's flagship rack sampler of the era: more voices, more memory, more outputs, and the same lovably gritty 12-bit Roland conversion. With a monitor and mouse it becomes a surprisingly deep sampling workstation, and it loads the entire Roland S-series library.

FEATURES & PROS:

• Flagship 12-bit Roland: The fullest version of that characterful late-80s Roland sampling sound.
• More outputs: Individual outputs for multitracking your samples straight to the desk.
• Visual editing: Monitor and mouse support for hands-on waveform and envelope work.
• Deep multitimbral engine: Build whole arrangements across MIDI channels.
• Big disk library: Reads the full Roland S-series floppy catalogue.

SPECIFICATIONS

• 12-bit digital sampler, 2U rackmount
• Multitimbral, MIDI In/Out/Thru
• Individual outputs, floppy drive
• RGB monitor + mouse support

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