There is no standard multisample VSTi format. Although soundfont and Akai are older formats, they ARE formats. No VSTi has the same data format as any other. That's kind of the point to them. The things have proprietary data format, so you HAVE to use that VSTi to have access to those sounds. Gigasampler was starting to become more common, but the problem was that the data sizes were so large, it was an impractical format for hardware samplers.

And while VSTi integration into hardware arrangers is a good idea, in practice it turns out to be VERY expensive and bad business for the arranger manufacturers. To make an arranger that can play VSTi's, you basically have to make an arranger that is an entire regular computer, running a regular computer OS (because that's what the VSTi is designed to run on) and THEN an entire arranger section, probably running on the same OS. So far these have turned out to be either miserable failures (the MS) or prohibitively expensive (the Wersi's).

Let's be honest... NEITHER of these are practical solutions. But the solution exists already... Akai.

Yes, while you can say that the 'best' sounding sampled instruments currently available need streaming hardware and GB sized libraries, let us not forget that there are MANY great sounding sample sets for Akai (probably every hit record before the late 90's used Akai's or maybe Roland or Emulator samplers) and they have one HUGE advantage for hardware arranger samplers... They had limited RAM sizes, so the sounds were very carefully optimized to use as little RAM as possible.

This makes loading them up in hardware samplers a practical thing (you wouldn't want to have to load 1GB just for a piano in a Yamaha!) and allows you to load in a bunch of things into the MUCH larger memories modern arranger samplers have (Akai only had about 256MB of memory even on the late S6000 models - but remember, that's 25 MINUTES of full bandwidth stereo sampling!).

Basically, if you want to use the sampler in your arranger, the Akai format is by FAR the best format to have. I still use much of those libraries in my production work, and some of them are still to be bettered by VSTi's. Something about having limited resources makes the sample producers work MUCH harder to get it to all sound good!

Sure, if money is no object, if integrating a computer into your hardware sampler is easy to you, VSTi's are often (but not always) the way to go. But for the rest of us, Akai still rules the roost. Yamaha, if they want their users to actually start using the sampler much (I doubt more than 10% use it much if at all) need to open it up for Akai import.