The MPC 4000 is an excellent upgrade that in my opinion takes the MPC2000/3000 to the next level. This new MPC has all the great drum-machine qualities of the 2000, but you can also play full piano, strings, bass sounds thanks to the Intel driven Z96 sampling engine, derived from AKAI’s Z4 and Z8 samplers. In addition, the MPC 4000 came with 270MB of RAM was very ample for my needs. As with past MPCs, this also makes an excellent portable live-performance box, so that all you gigging cats out there can mix your beats on the fly instead of having to rhyme to a CD and risk getting off-track.
My favorite features on this sample beast were the 96KHz/24bit sampling ability, the Q-Link control knobs, and the USB connectivity. For hip-hop, fidelity is rarely a must have, but never the less, I connected my Tech-12 up to the direct phono input on the back and grabbed some nice Miles Davis and Chick Corea samples off vinyl at 96KHz. The sound quality was definitely nice! The Q-Link knobs were also fun to play with, and I could see a lot of potential with them, more for technoheads, though. There were a lot of quality sweepable filters that you could control with the Q-link section. You could also use the knobs and faders to quickly set-up and edit your track mixes with your sequences, another nice feature. The USB interface was another great idea, and it worked great! I first hooked up the 4000 to my G4 867 after installing the USB drivers and the AKSYS software. I could tell there was a lot yet to be implemented, such as the ablility to control the MPC from the computer. But, being able to drag and drop your samples to or from the AKAI was a great time-saver, and allowed for easy editing of samples with more familiar software. I also connected through Virtual-PC to checkout the windows version of the AKSYS, but it was pretty much the same as the Mac version. On a whim, I connected my stock Zip250 USB drive up to the 4000, and it worked perfectly! I saved and loaded all my samples to and from it fine. I also took some AKAI floppy images of my friends beats from a PC, over a LAN to my Mac, dumped onto my Zip250, and loaded into the AKAI, and they worked fine.
I think this is an amazing machine, with a lot of future potential as of yet untapped. This was a very professional machine with professional features and connectors, and a much more mature MPC than those of years past.