I have both of these samplers. The S950 was decided upon by members help from this forum so as a way of thanks I thought Id leave me feelings of the S950 making comparisons to an S1000.

Sound quality wise all as I can say is my ears must be failing. Wrote all over the internet is people saying "ooo you must have am S950 to give you that 12Bit crunch"

Well I can hear no bit crunch at all!! If you set the S950 to the max bandwidth which is something like 48K and compare to the S1000 there is nothing in it. Nothing worth talking about anyhow. This is a technical feat from Akai re 12 bit Samplers.

If you want crunch or rather lo fi, set the bandwidth to a low setting. But then this is all about sampling frequency crunch and not how many bits are used. The S1000 only goes to 20k or somewhere near (Havent the manual to hand) so thats the reason the S950 sounds more lo fi. If the S1000 went to 7k also im sure the results would be similar.

When these samplers first came out in 88 Id have gone for the S950 if sound quality was the only issue as the S950 was far cheaper than the S1000. However these days if a hardware sampler with an akai sound (and not lo fi) is your thing Id go for an S1000. Why? Because you could get 3x S1000s for the price of one S950 and there is nothing in it.

Of course im taking raw sampler to sampler comparison. Stick these two in a mix compressed, EG'd, Delayed and reverbed and I honestly think everyone would fail the pepsi challenge.

If we now move away from sound quality all together and just look at features then the S1000 wipes the floor. With an LCD screen to 32 meg, SCSI (that you can actually buy) I could go on all day.
However, if like me you like very light and easy (I am a guy that finds the SH-101 overwhelming :] ) than the S950 is for you.

To conclude I am very happy I have bought the S950. I personally prefer it to the S1000 as it can sound the same or lo fi but this crunch everyone bangs on about eludes me. Also I prefer the ultra simplicity as it hardly has any features. It can sample, filter, timestetch and thats about it. Suits me fine.

However if you looking for a budget hardware sampler for what ever reason (I can give you plenty) then don't overlook the S1000

Anyone else ever compared these directly?

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