Article Preview - Akai MPC5000

Akai's MPC has been with us for 20 years now — an incredibly long time in music production. So is the latest addition to this venerable range, the MPC5000, a worthy bearer of its standard?

Mike Senior

Akai's MPC range has played an important part in the development of hip-hop music, and these solidly built sampling sequencers have also made inroads into a lot of other electronic styles, particularly where live performance is the order of the day. The latest in this noble line is the new MPC5000, a beefed-up big brother to the MPC2500 (and not, as some might guess, a sequel to the MPC4000, which was rather the black sheep of the MPC flock, more related to the Z-series samplers, and discontinued some time ago).

Like the MPC2500, the philosophy of the machine revolves around the pairing of a 64-track MIDI sequencer with a streamlined 16-bit/44.1kHz drum/phrase sampler, all housed in a desktop unit controlled using the obligatory 4x4 pad matrix and assorted buttons, knobs and sliders. Because a lot of this basic functionality was dealt with in my MPC2500 review back in the January 2007 edition of SOS, let me refer you to that for an overview of how the MPC concept works, so that I can concentrate on the expanded features of the MPC5000 here.

Hardware Upgrades

Measuring 9.7 x 41 x 41cm (HxWxD) and weighing in at 18.2lbs, the MPC5000's hardware immediately makes its tribal 'alpha' status clear, with doubled LCD-screen acreage and a tripling of the Q-Link control count. A less visible enhancement is that an 80GB hard-drive is now included as standard, which works alongside any suitable card you insert into the onboard Compact Flash slot and the optional CD-RW drive. The USB connectivity has also been streamlined to make both the hard disk and Compact Flash drives accessible as external drives from your computer simultaneously. The Flash ROM that I liked on the MPC2500 is present too, but while I could delete things from it, I couldn't actually save anything there, which is a shame.

Some extra connections have popped up on the rear panel, such as a pair of extra RCA phono inputs that can be switched to accept either normal line signals or the direct output of a DJ's turntable; a suitable grounding post can be found beneath the sockets. The main recording inputs have had a make-over, with combi-jack/XLR sockets allowing the unit to accept balanced mic as well as line signals. An accompanying switch boosts the input's sensitivity to cope with mic-level signals, but disappointingly there's no phantom power facility, so you'll have to stick to dynamic mics, or those condensers (such as valve models) with their own power supplies. (And before anyone argues that its dangerous to have phantom power on a combi-jack/XLR socket, because of the possibility of feeding 48V to line-level equipment, I'd like to point out that this potential problem was solved very elegantly in Roland's much less expensive SP555 groovebox.)

A final interesting addition is the ADAT lightpipe connector, which can transfer the MPC's eight individual outputs (or the main outputs and individual outputs 3-8) digitally to other studio equipment. When used alongside the existing coaxial S/PDIF connector, this could give you 10-channel real-time digital transfer, something I can imagine appealing a great deal to those beat-makers who start productions on the MPC but then migrate to something like Pro Tools for overdubbing and mixing.

Increased Sampling Power

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Article Preview - Akai MPC5000

Sampling Workstation