As someone who lusted after music hardware my entire youth (and has a broken Roland XP80 and Akai S01 and hundreds of useless floppies and a working DX7 and TX8

As someone who lusted after music hardware my entire youth (and has a broken Roland XP80 and Akai S01 and hundreds of useless floppies and a working DX7 and TX81z sitting behind me) I have to agree. Especially for hardware that is 100% in the digital domain or where you will be doing a ton of manual manipulation, just use a laptop. Get a copy of RX950 (https://www.inphonik.com/products/rx950-classic-ad-da-converter/ https://www.inphonik.com/products/rx950-classic-ad-da-conver...) and Decimort 2 (https://d16.pl/decimort2 https://d16.pl/decimort2) or whatever the newest equivalent is to fill you Akai sampler sound needs. If you really want to twist knobs, I have a Novation 49SLMkIII (https://us.novationmusic.com/sl https://us.novationmusic.com/sl) with 8 encoders mapped to all kinds of things in my default Ableton template. It's so friggen amazing (parts of the living in the future are really cool). I only wish there was a place for music collaboration in this future reality (and not just 'I can't be bothered to read the manual/learn music technique be my interactive manual' or horrible toxic negativity (looking at you KVR and GS)). Edit: I prefer other filters than rx950 that have more flexibility only recommending it if you need a specific Akai replacement. BTW it's sometimes the included freebie at PluginBoutique. Jason Herd uses it to good use in this walkthrough https://faderpro.com/programs/making-minimal-tech-garage https://faderpro.com/programs/making-minimal-tech-garage.