have used all three - prefer akai myself......just personal opinion though....if you can stretch to a s5000 or s6000 second hand with the usb option it's well worth it. This allows you to connect up the sampler to your pc using a (free) program called aksys . This way you can save all your samples on your hard drive, edit them in your favourite program (I use soundforge) and then transfer them back to the sampler, which is much easier than using the tiny screen, and it also really speeds up creating keygroups etc....best of both worlds...