I guess that i 'm the lucky guy around! It was early 2017 and I was desperately looking for an AKAI S-950! So, i was looking on eBay and other sites but I couldn't find one that I could afford (every seller back then had it for at least 450eu and if I bought it from US i would have to pay for import charges and shipping almost 250eu extra... Next thing I do is look outside eBay. I found an advertisement from a guy in Cyprus selling one for 200 eu (I live in Greece so the shipping cost is about 30eu) . Needless to mention that i contacted him right away,really nice guy (I hope he doesn’t read this
)
At the time I didn’t know if it was memory expanded (he didn’t either as he didn’t know if it worked so he had to test it first) so, after some trouble with Paypal he sent it and I received while at work , so i was waiting to finish and test it right away!
First thing I noticed when I pushed the “Power” button was that, while it was loading, it wrote “512 kwords” which is the minimum memory. …”****” I thought
, “i have to spend extra money for memory,that's why it was't that expensive " and the screen worked but it wasn't bright (known issue due to power supply) plus that thing which was already inside and ringing as i was moving it , which in most of the cases is not a good thing!
So, I take the whole thing at home and I took the risky decision to take it all apart and there it was! two extra memory expansion slots below the large PCBs got loose and I put them back in place (I now know that i could have opened it from below but I hadn’t noticed back then , it was the first day after all ).
Now I had to know if it worked as it did and YES, not only it did but,next thing I read while loading was “1536 words”.
So I bought the whole thing memory expanded with a little bit of adventure about it for 230eu (shipping included) and I also installed a nice bright screen and the latest firmware 1.2A, all together for 80 eu (shipping included also) so, you could say that so far it cost me 310eu to buy it AND bring it back to near mint condition