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Akai S3200 with 32MB RAM

“I am selling an AKAI professional S3200 Midi Stereo Digital Sampler, nice condition for it’s age – some slight cosmetic damage (please see warts and all pix), loaded with options, complete with various home-brew o/s discs and the original operator’s manual in excellent nick.

The condition of this item is ‘used’. Please read on for more detail on that and note that it is ‘sold as seen’ as I’m not in a position to be able to thoroughly test all functionality.

That said, it is alive! It switches on and boots up, receives midi and spits out signal from all ten outputs. Beyond that I cannot vouch. More detail below.

I purchased this then flagship AKAI sampler when working for Microprose the games company back in the late 90s. I subsequently purchased it from them secondhand so it’s been with me its entire life.

We went all out on the spec with SMPTE card, hard disc drive, digital card, maxed-out memory and SCSI card. Also has the fx board (which may have been standard? Can’t remember).

This sampler has had a pretty stress-free life mostly in various project studios, occasionally gigged (in SKB rack) and given it’s lifespan hardly used. For quite a few years now, it’s been unused in safe clean warm storage only switched on now and then.

The display seems completely functional but to my eyes on the dim side. It’s hard to photograph but I’ve tried – if anything, phone photos tend make it look worse than it is due to reflection. I looked into replacing the backlight and although a new one is relatively cheap, fitting one is beyond my confidence level having taken the lid off and had a peek under the hood (hence some of the pix showing a surprisingly clean and tidy interior).

All the buttons and knobs seem to be working and so is the floppy disc drive. I’ve successfully loaded a program and samples from a 3.5″ floppy disc.

There is an internal hard disc drive fitted inside this item but I can’t seem get the machine to read it so it may be out of commission – further evidenced by trying to use the ‘park’ function which after attempting to park the heads shows the message ‘bad park’. The unit boots up without a floppy disc so guess the o/s is on a RAM chip?” Click here to search for MPCs on eBay