Akai S950 S950 (image courtesy of AkaiPro). Synopsis: Bridges the S900 and S1000 lines Architecture Class: Sampler. Ebay Description: The Akai S950 is a 3U rack, 8 voice, velocity sensitive, 12 bit sampler with 8 individual outputs, featuring a programmable digital low pass filter, vibrato, dedicated ADSR filter and amp envelopes, auto-bend, and MIDI. Akai S950 Program Packs for MPC X/Live/One I've spent a couple of days with the auto sampler to create some Programs for the MPC by recording Akai S950 sounds into key groups. Personally if you are like me and you dig that old 12-bit sound, stretched to the limit, and then some, then check these out. I spent another week or so auto sampling, trimming, and chopping samples from the S950 to get that crunchy S950 12-bit sound. If you're looking for the sample packs you can grab them at the following.

Very useful “must have” tools for akai S1k/S3k samplers:

Omni Flop – reads and saves akai floppys and images (Win XP)
Wav2Akai – converts wavs to akai s1000 *.p programs (Win 98, XP)
EMXP – soft for Emu and Akai for reading and saving akai programs or wavs to floppy (Win XP)
Akai Util – reads akai disks and images (Win XP) project homepage
Akai Disk – reads and saves akai floppy programs (Win 98)
Akai Sex – converts floppy disks, programs between s900 s950 s1000 s3000 formats (for Atari ST / TT/ Falcon only!)
AWave – shareware sample converter, program editor, reads and saves in akai s1000 or s3000 formats. Reads akai floppy images from Omni Flop. Also it can read edit and save akai s5000 *.akp format (Win XP)
Chicken Sys Translator – commercial powerful sample converter. Read, save, format akai jaz disks, zip disks, hard drives, cd-roms. Convert many free available soundfonts to akai and save it directly to akai disk! Must have!
C6 SMID sample dump utility free tool for uploading samples via midi (mac and windows) / local copy: macwindows

so i recently shipped my entire studio overseas by boat... pretty much everything arrived fully functional, but it appears something happened to my S900 along the way... i can assume it was thrown around a bit, as that's how cargo usually gets treated, but it was shipped along with all my other rack equipment in a 12-space wooden flight case.
the S900 powers up fine, the floppy drive works perfectly as well... it receives MIDI signal, loads files, etc... it does everything except output any sound at all... not even the TONE PROGRAM will play from any of the outputs [despite it showing that it's receiving the MIDI signal]... none of my samples saved on diskette will come out of the outputs either...

Akai S950 Tone Programming

so far i've opened it up and checked for any loose cables or roms... i didn't see anything out of the ordinary, but i disconnected and reconnected pretty much every single cable [including the ones that run from the board with all the audio outputs]... but still no sound at all... it's very odd and frustrating at the same time... last i knew, it was working perfectly before i traveled... however, one thing i'm noticing is that the OUTPUT volume knob on the front panel is just a little bit loose... since that knob sticks out the most it may have possibly gotten hit from the front along the way... i'm not sure to be honest, but is there a way to override the volume on the front panel and set it to full level so to speak? i'm running out of things to try out here... any other suggestions are welcome as well... thanks for your time...