page_title: Akai
section_title: S series digital samplers
hierarchical_section_title: Akai / History / Akai Professional / S series digital samplers
caption_attribution_description: AKAI S6000 remote
context_page_description: Akai was a Japanese consumer electronics brand. The company, Akai Electric Company Ltd, was founded in 1946 in Tokyo, Japan, and defunct in 2002. Grande Holdings in Hong Kong took over Akai's Brand, now it is distributing various electronics products such as LED TV, washing machines, air conditioners and smart phones, collaborated with other electronics companies. On the other hand, inMusic Brands in United States also took over Akai's Brand. It began Akai Professional brand, and is distributing high-end audio electronics products.
context_section_description: The S612 12-bit digital sampler in 1985, was the first in a series of (relatively) affordable samplers already in 19-inch studio-rack format but in black color. It held only a single sample at a time, which was loaded into memory via a separate disk drive utilizing Quick Disk 2.8-inch floppy disks. The maximum sample time at the highest quality sampling rate (32 kHz) was one second.
  The introduction of a "professional" range of digital samplers began with the 12-bit S900 in 1986, followed by the X7000 keyboard sampler in 1986, and the S700 rack-mount version in 1987. Unlike the single-sample S612, however, they allowed the use of six active samples at once, had a built-in disk drive and could be extended with six individual outputs via cable and a flash memory extension which added another six samples to the memory for multisample playback. The S700/X7000 sampler series were light-grey colored, which didn't change throughout the whole "professional" range of Akai samplers.
  The 16-bit Akai S1000 series followed in 1988, adding the option to read CD-ROMs and write to hard disks via SCSI. This range was superseded by the S3000 series in 1993, with optional built-in CD-ROM drive, followed by the S5000 and S6000.  Additional releases of note were the Z4 and Z8 24-bit 96 kHz samplers.
caption: S6000 remote
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