Akai S5000 / S6000
S5000 is my second favorite sampler. It sounds excellent, very clean and polished. Filters are not very aggressive or spectacular (however with resonance), but you get many types to choose (26 types). Good midi implementation, two lfos with many different waves. It has 64 voices of polyphony (s6000 has 128), max 256mb of memory (by using cheap 72pin simms). Very easy to edit, big screen, you can even plug ps2 keyboard. It accepts scsi removable drives and hard disks. You can get optional usb card for transferring and editing samples. S5000 can read *.wav samples and fat32 disks so even without usb card transfer from computer to S5000 is simple and easy. S5000 *.akp format is very popular, all sample converters can convert to akp. For example ChickenSys Translator or AWave which can even create and edit programs. All you need for transfer without usb card is removable drive in your pc (usb or ide) and second scsi removable drive in akai. Personally i use 2gb scsi jazz drives, but you can use more popular zip drives. S5000 is cheap, you can get it for max 200 pounds ($300). There is optional multi fx board eb20, but honestly… effects sounds very cheap… I prefer effects on old S1100. S5000 has additional 8 outs so you can use external effects (i recommend this).
more info at vintagesynth.com soundonsound.com synthman.com sonicstate.com
manuals, latest os and software available at akaipro.com
or download it from local page here
About Author
Hej
i´m really glad finding the download section for all the needed programs to run my number 1 sampler s6000 from akai :) !
http://martin78.com/files/akai_s5000/s5000-stuff.html
but the os download S5/6000 – OS V2.14 isn´t workin how it should .
It´s downloading the s56x210.pdf ! Could u pls check what´s going wrong and rework it ! Would help me alot ! Respekt and thx
thanks for info, fixed :)
Hi Martin,
I excitedly upgraded the firmware to 2.14 recently and now my s5000 has problems reading disks and storing samples in memory and is now practically unusable.
Of course i didn’t think to find a backup of firmware 2.12 before doing this, would you have any info on where i could find the .bin?
Thanks!
I’m sorry that you have problems with new os. Unfortunately i don’t have old eprom image. I upgrade my s5000 without problems. Try find someone with old system.
Successfully upgarded my S5000V2 from OS2.11a to OS2.14 without any issue. Thank you so much for sharing the data and all the information. Thumbs up!!! :)
is there maybe a guide or an helpline how update the OS to 2.14 ?
i download the file and unpack it , write it on a floppy disk – nothing hapend
The Problem is , unzip the OS2.14 file with Mac OS-X .
To my fellow Akai S5000 Users, anyone upgrade from the S5000 from 1.20 to V2 2.14 and how they were able to get the S5000 to read the floppy with the 2.14 and install? Im having issues getting the OS on the floppy to save on the S5000. I would appreciate the info.
I am so happy to find this site.. Got an almost unused S6000 with USB expansion card and EB20 effects board..
Had it forever and kept it boxed, planning to dust it down and have a play but I remember the OS disk was corrupt last time I played with it ..(or was it a memory issue?).. Anyway, gonna play and will no doubt come back here if I hit issues..