Hi,

Go and have a listen to each of them. They are both good sounding units. I find the E-mu's to be a bit more warm-sounding and more transparent while the Akai's have a hyped, crunchy sound. The Akai's are excellent for drums and percussive type sounds. I find the E-mu's great for acoustic and synth sounds. You can achieve a similar hyped sound on the E-mu's by using eq and compression and possibly an exciter.

Anyway, I had the same question in my mind about a month ago. I decided on the new E-5000 Ultra by E-mu. Locally, the S-5000 is $1000 more expensive. I nearly went with an E4XT Ultra but it was a little expensive for me now and I thought that for the same price, I could get a second E5000 in the future. The biggest drawbacks with the E5000 is only 4 outputs standard (can be expanded to 12) and a 64-note polyphony limit. Getting a second E5000 gives me the 128-note polyphony with the added bonus of being able to load up 256 MB RAM and a second unit in case the first one goes down.

The Akai S5000/6000 OS still seems to have a few bugs and I cannot afford to beta test OS's on a sampler I will use in a live setting. If I was in the studio, I wouldn't worry about it too much though as the major bugs do seem to have been fixed.

If you want any more details or have any questions, email me. HTH

Fernando

[This message has been edited by fvicente (edited 01-04-2000).]