Akai must certainly be one of the fastest moving major companies to have broken into the domain of musical instruments for the pro/semi-pro musician. Only eight months have passed since we saw their first admirable efforts in this line — a polyphonic MIDI synthesizer and a 12-track mixer/recorder using a video cassette-like recording medium, with electronic routing etc; not a bad start for a hi-fi manufacturer.

Now, eight new additions to their range of pro music equipment have appeared — all MIDI based and as state-of-the-art as you can get — a MIDI music computer comprising of disk drive, display recorder and editing boards, a MIDI DDL, arpeggiator and fader, a new polysynth, a mother keyboard, a rackmounted synth module, and this, the S612 MIDI sampling unit.

Housed in a 2U 19 rack mounting unit, the front panel styling is not unlike Yamaha's current design — mauve, green, brown and blue touch-pads and knobs, a couple of sliders, red LEDs and numeric display.

Glancing over the front panel controls in order to get some kind of idea as to what we can expect from the S612 (as there was not a scrap of documentation accompanying this review sample), one finds that the S612 has controls for looping and editing of the samples which can either be loaded singly or overdubbed. There is an LFO and a very crude filter (more a treble-cut pot), along with various monitoring and recording level controls.

In fact the only information to hand on the Akai S612 sampler was to be found by rummaging through the mound of hand-outs one invariably accumulates from the Frankfurt show; and there I came across some information revealing it to use 12-bit sampling of sounds which can be played with six note polyphony (as its name would imply) from any MIDI instrument. With that premise to build on, let's run through the front panel controls and their various functions.

Functions

Starting on the left is the power on/off switch, two input jacks (mike and line), input level and monitor level knobs. The monitor level simply controls the amount of input signal which is heard from the output. To its right is a seven stage LED record level meter with indicators in green up to 0dB, and then three reds for 0, +3 and +5dB. There is one other input socket, marked 'Ext Trigger' and this is not for the external triggering of samples, but for manually controlling the start of sampling.

The 'DX7-ish' touch-pads in the centre of this unit's fascia are colour-coded, the two red buttons on the left are for recording of samples, purple buttons for MIDI channel and Mono/poly switching, brown for data transfer to disk, and blue for sustain mode (looping etc). Coming back to the two record mode buttons, these are labelled New and Overdub; when you hit the New button, on hearing a signal the S612 will load a new sample, erasing the memory's previous contents. However, by hitting the Overdub button, you will retain the previous sample, whilst being able to load a new sample on top of it.

This feature is quite useful for building up unusual effects, however I found its best use was in simulating multisamples over the keyboard. For example, a single sample of a piano will sound great within the octave of the sampled note, yet when you play a couple of octaves away, it will begin to sound like a banjo, or a low 'mess' as the case may be. Thus by sampling two or three notes over the keyboard, although not cutting out the sound of samples out of their range, the effect does still dramatically improve the scaling of the voices. You could, of course, overdub many more times than just two or three, but you degrade the sound quality much in the same way as 'bouncing' on a conventional tape machine.

At this point, mention should be made of the sound quality of the S612. Sampling time is determined by playing a note on the MIDI instrument prior to sampling, and a high note will give two seconds and a low note can extend it up to eight seconds. Obviously the bandwidth deteriorates as sample time increases, optimum quality being achieved at the minimum sampling time. This appeared to be approximately 15kHz. This fell, when the sampling time was increased to eight seconds, to a point where the only sound which could be heard to be approaching the treble frequencies was the small amount of background hiss coming from the S612's output stage!

Under a small heading labelled 'MIDI' are three mauve-coloured touch-pads for Mono/Poly, Channel Up and Channel Down switching. The S612 will receive MIDI information (key on/off, pitch and velocity sensing) on nine MIDI channels as well as an Omni mode for reception from any MIDI channel (display reading 'O' in this case).

Beneath the MIDI switching are three brown touch-pads for data transfer to-and-from disk. Although I was not supplied with Akai's optional 'Quick Disk', I did get to see one in action in Frankfurt, and when the S612 is used in conjunction with the quick disk, the whole system becomes quite a bit more versatile as it can be used to store libraries of, say, alternate snares, or different bass guitars for different tracks (for studio use), or simply many different samples and effects for live use (all looping etc being stored with the samples, of course). In fact to get anything approaching the most out of this unit I would recommend that it be used with the disk drive as the looping and editing of samples can be quite a fiddly business, as I soon found out...

Going loopy

To the right of the record level indicator are two horizontal sliders, beneath which are three blue touchpads marked One Shot, Looping, and Alternative. These are the controls with which samples are tidied-up. In the straightforward One Shot mode, a sample will be replayed once, and the two sliders will control its start and end points. This is how you can sample perhaps a couple of seconds off a drum track, and then 'edit' it so as to just play the snare, for example.

In the Looping mode these sliders are assigned to the start and end of the loop. In order to hear how sliding the sliders affects the looping, there is a black button on the back of the S612 which repeats the sample every time a slider is moved — a very useful function, but still it is next to impossible to produce a loop without a slight click on this unit. One other looping mode is available, and this is called Alternative. In this mode, certain unconventional looping affects can be achieved, such as the first loop being a segment of the original sample, yet played backwards.

Edging our way further to the right are to be found an LFO and output section. The LFO controls consist of rate and depth as well as a delay control for determining the amount of time before the LFO affects the sample. The LFO is very useful in 'covering up' clicks in loops, and does de-humanise sampled vocals quite nicely. In the output section is a tone control and a decay control which will affect the release time of the sample. Then all that is left is the output level control, a tuning control and a single output socket to conclude the front panel bits and pieces.

Over on the S612's back panel are the MIDI connections, a socket for the disk drive (presumably, as there are no labels on the back panel of this model — not even to say which is the MIDI In or Thru...), and a computer like connector.

There is one other little button on the back panel, in addition to the black one I mentioned. This is a red (again unlabelled) button above which is a red LED which flashes when the button is pushed. What it does when pressed is to enable transposition of the samples over the keyboard. You press the button, the LED will flash, and then the note you play on the keyboard will correspond to the original pitch of the sample.

It is rather peculiar that in a 19" rackmounting unit (as this is), that they have omitted to put additional inputs and outputs on the rear panel for studio linkage to a patchbay.

Conclusion

This is quite an expensive piece of equipment, retailing at around £1000, and for that money one would expect reasonably good results, which explains why the Akai S612's... reasonably good. Not amazing, as there is no autolooping or multisampling over a keyboard (I don't think there could be on this system as it stands), and the sound quality is only of pro-quality at the shorter sampling times of less than three seconds. Prior to its release, there would not have been very much competition for the price — perhaps the Bel DDL, and the price would then be justified for polyphonic replay via MIDI and the facility for data storage on disk. It is a bit of a shame, I feel, that the S612 has to have a disk drive as an option, having to get yet another box...

Nevertheless, Akai have produced an extremely worthy sampler in the form of the S612, and I hope that when I do get my hands on its instruction manual that there are a few hidden functions I've missed out. At the time of writing, various competition for this sampler have yet to have their retail prices announced — such as the Mirage, and the Korg SDD2000 — and so it remains to be seen if the Akai S612 will be as successful as it could be.

AKAI S612 MIDI SAMPLER - RRP: £899 QUICK DISK: £279.90