You think..?

Two things... up until Giga Sampler, nearly ALL sampling was done on Akai. Roland had a decent
share of the Hollywood market, Emu were still hanging around, but the #1 selling sampler was Akai.
EVERYONE made disks for it... some very high end stuff (Platinum Drums, Russ Garfield, XSample, Peter Siedlek,
Ilio - all their drum loop libraries were available in Groove control format, ready sliced with MIDI files to
play it back - just what you need for Audya-like drums) the list just goes on.

And secondly, unlike most Giga stuff, the file sizes were kept down to seldom over 32MB (some big stuff
got spread over two loads to get a 64MB piano, for instance) so they are ideal for loading in your
arranger (which are not exactly known for fast loading times!) rather than the GB sized instruments
that streaming allows. You wouldn't want to spend nearly an hour waiting to load your maxed out T2,
now would you?

Trust me on this one... if you haven't heard the TOTL libraries that were produced for Akai in it's heyday
(and can often be found at very reasonable used prices, now), you can't compare it to any of the
internal sounds except the SA ones (and that's more a function of the triggering than the samples).

Hollywood used Akai extensively in the eighties... They sure as hell ain't using T3's now!

Sure, there were duffers around back then. There are still duffers for Giga, too. But the same people
designing TOTL libraries now were the same people working in Akai back then. I still use a fair amount of
legacy Akai stuff ported to my Kurzweil. As good as it's internal ROM is (I've got the expansion ROM's),
the Akai sounds for most things blow it away, and are still making it to the final mix on many projects.