S900

Back in 1986, this rackmount sampler kicked off Akai's pro lineup by packing a built-in 3.5-inch floppy drive right into a 3U chassis—one of the first to let you load sounds on the fly while playing, even if it took its sweet time.

At its heart, it's an 8-voice polyphonic digital beast with 12-bit linear sampling from 7.5kHz to 40kHz, giving you up to 63 seconds of mono sample time at the low end or punchier fidelity higher up. The front panel keeps things hands-on with eight mode buttons for Play, Record, Edit, and more, a 40x2 LCD display, numeric keypad, data wheel, and three knobs for tweaking; dive into pages for looping (including rare ping-pong mode), truncating, velocity crossfading, pitch transposition over six octaves, a non-resonant -12dB/octave filter with key tracking, ADSR envelopes, and LFOs. It offers stereo inputs, eight individual voice outs plus stereo mix, MIDI, and trigger ins, all in a sturdy 483 x 429 x 133mm frame weighing 10.9kg with fixed 750kB RAM.

Players still chase its raw, gritty 12-bit character today, especially in house, hip-hop, and studio setups where that vintage edge cuts through mixes—though the slow disk loads and limited memory test your patience.