Ciao from Italy!
2004-09-09 by Mauro
Hi, my name is Mauro Bottari and I'm a new user of this group, from Italy. I own two Akai S1000 but in the past I used to have an Akai S1000KB in my home studio (I was making dance music with it). I've sold the S1000KB long ago (as well as all the other dance-oriented synths), and wanted to buy a S3000XL... till I found these two S1000 that were really cheap (another Italian studio making dance music was selling them). I always wanted Akai samplers because they have a huge sound library, most of all the S1000, and you can find a lot of good sounds on the internet for free: these days I like to hear the sounds of Mellotron and Clavinet coming out of my Akais !! (no more dance stuff!) This is my setup: (just in case someone wants to know it...) The main S1000 has 26 Mb of memory (three boards marked "MAARTISTS USA MUSIC PACK S-8000/Z", I guess of 8Mb each; the fourth is un- branded, but should be 2Mb, right?), a Mu-tech SCSI interface and what it seems to be an original Akai digital I/O card. It sports OS v3.0 on eprom. The previous owner managed to fit inside of it a Maxtor SCSI harddisk (200 Mb or so), but the power connector was coming from an external SCSI rack (with a cd-rom inside of it): he told me that the internal power supply was not enough powerful to drive the hard disk too... What I've discovered with a simple tester is that an hard drive can't be powered from the power connector of the internal disk-drive (connector P118 on my S1000 PCB) because it only has the 5Vdc voltage, while a complete power connector for a 3.5" hard disk should have also the 12Vdc voltage. In previous posts of this group I've read that there is a P125 connector on the S1000 PCB that can be used to power an internal drive: I can't find it... someone can tell me where is it, please ? The second S1000 has only 8Mb of memory (4 boards of 2Mb each) and a Mu-tech SCSI interface (without internal connector); it's display is quite dark (I should replace that EL-foil...). Originally the two samplers where connected together with a SCSI flat ribbon cable (looks like it's poorly hand made), that connected them to an external SCSI cd-rom: it worked fine, both the samplers could boot from the hard-disk inside one of then and read the cd-rom. I've rearranged my set-up this way (and it works!!!): the two samplers are still connected together with the SCSI flat- ribbon and with the external cd-rom, but I disliked the internal hard-disk feeded from the external power unit, so I took it off the sampler and put by its own into another SCSI external box. The cd-rom is then connected to an external SCSI Zip drive, which in turn is connected to the hard-disk: I've got 3 units and 2 hosts on the same SCSI bus (and it's quite longer than overall 3 meters!), both the samplers boot from the same hard-disk (from a boot volume with the OS v4.40) and can use the 3 SCSI units... I've experimented simultaneous access from the two samplers to the same unit (loading the same samples from the cd-rom): things get slower than normal, but it still works! Ciao, Mauro.