Quote Originally Posted by hiroprotagonist
interesting points you bring up. ive always been a hardware person mysef but the more i hear it seems even the hardware that come sout for a decent price is only second hand to software. a little dissapointing but id still like to get my paws on one.
great review thanks. oh yeah how were the effects onboard? sound quality? ease of use?
I've been using my MPC1000 for a few days shy of five months now, and feel qualified to answer your questions.

Effects onboard - decent, for what's there. There's not that many! There's "Bit Grunger", "4-Band EQ", "Compressor", "Phase Shifter", "Tremelo", "Flying Pan" and "Reverb". You can use any two effects on any program, and they can be fed into each other to create a single supereffect. I've mostly used the Bit Grunger, but to be honest, I've *rarely* used them - I mean, it's a sampler. I tweak all my samples in Soundforge or Wavelab before squirting them over to the MPC over the USB port, and VST effects are just way easier to use. I'm also very fond of doing FX via aux sends on my mixing desk.

Obvious GLARING omission in the effects - NO DELAY?!

Sound quality - excellent. Better than the 2000 and 2000XL, and some folks are saying better than the MPC3000. I can't notice a difference. Akai obviously didn't cheap out on the DACs in this one.

Ease of use? Well, in the first two weeks, I had to go back to the manual a few times - mostly for sampling questions. I had never really had a sampler quite so powerful as this! On the sequencing side, however, I only went back probably twice, and both times it wasn't so much "How does this feature work" as it was "I wonder if the MPC can do *this*..." (and incidentally, it was two weeks before I found something I wanted it to do that it COULDN'T do!). I'm very, very happy with it; the manual has been shelved for three months - even so, the manual is well written and easy to read, with only a few bits of engrish.

PROS: excellent, EXCELLENT live-pa MIDI sequencer, with a helluva sampler tacked on for good measure. MIDI and samples exist flawlessly together in the same interface. Sounds great, feels solid, and backups are easy with CompactFlash cards. Well-designed in the kind of way that only gear thats been around for 20 years can feel.

CONS: new gear. In the five months I've had it, I've run into three bugs - one of those bugs was fixed in the recent OS release, which is reassuring, but two are still outstanding. It must be noted that neither bug causes any instability, just inconvenience - one bug is the inability to pass a lot of MIDI data from the MIDI-in to the MIDI-thru without dropping notes (only an issue when NOT using hte MPC as the top of the MIDI chain). The other bug is tiny, just misbehavior if you switch patterns with a track solo'd - the solo'd track stays solo'd, but when you un-solo, the switched on tracks are the one from the previour pattern, not the ones that should be switched on in the new pattern.

Overall, I'm *VERY* happy with this machine. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer them.