Are we ever gonna see really good emulations of vintage Akai

I am wondering, with Akai’s legacy and the desirability of classic machines like the S950 filter and pitch behaviour, S1000 timestretch, MPC 3000 clarity and punch and rec in overdrive, are we ever going to see actually accurate emulations of these behaviours in the modern MPC.
Currently they’re using one size fits all approaches that seem to miss the mark. But all the emulations are out there (Tal Sampler, RX 950, Akaizer etc), so why can’t Air/inmusic bring them into the MPC?

Seems like an absolute no brainer for Akai to have highly accurate Akai sampler emulations. They've had plenty of opportunity to do this properly, but they seem happy with the original vintage mode plugins which we all know are not accurate in any way and likely quickly cobbled together during a coffee break. I suspect we'd have to wait for Jack to buy up inPhonik before we see it done properly in an MPC.

S950 is a variable playback sampler which means that you can throw the 'accuracy' out of the window as soon as you introduce any interpolation or samplerate conversion by bringing it into mpc. All they have to do is to is take JUCE IIR butterworth filter slap a nice graphics on it and call it a day, nobody will pay attention about anything else anyway. All those vst making LLMs exposed hypocrisy in the beatmaking community to the point I've actually stopped fighting it and started watching and having a tremendous blast at the same time lolol. Usually the people who will stuff you with all those "mastering tips" and talking about importance of "sonics" are the same people who will try to sell you $79 claude prompted plugin without having any idea about how it works

EDIT:
need to come back to it and finish it at some point... too much on my plate
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y-8QvaWHFLI

dustyslices wrote:S950 is a variable playback sampler which means that you can throw the 'accuracy' out of the window as soon as you introduce any interpolation or samplerate conversion by bringing it into mpc. All they have to do is to is take JUCE IIR butterworth filter slap a nice graphics on it and call it a day, nobody will pay attention about anything else anyway. All those vst making LLMs exposed hypocrisy in the beatmaking community to the point I've actually stopped fighting it and started watching and having a tremendous blast at the same time lolol. Usually the people who will stuff you with all those "mastering tips" and talking about importance of "sonics" are the same people who will try to sell you $79 claude prompted plugin without having any idea about how it works

EDIT:
need to come back to it and finish it at some point... too much on my plate
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y-8QvaWHFLI

How do you make those cumstom backgrounds?

Hey everyone, first post here. I do think we'll get good emulations like this someday but it's going to take a long time. Modern MPCs are trying to be a DAW and there's tons of ground to cover. Eventually Akai will make enough headway on that to start looking at other ways to maximize profit. Consolidating the sonic legacy of MPC is a natural avenue. To do it right will require solid emulation on the sampling input, ADC, sampler interpolation, DAC, filters, and output stage. I expect lots of half measures and bitter complaints along the way but yeah. Someday.

dustyslices wrote:S950 is a variable playback sampler which means that you can throw the 'accuracy' out of the window as soon as you introduce any interpolation or samplerate conversion by bringing it into mpc.

I think Tal sampler has a convincing variable playback emulation in their sampler.
But of course it’s more effort than slapping a logo on a bitcrusher and calling it vintage emu.

johnnytravels wrote:I think Tal sampler has a convincing variable playback emulation in their sampler.
But of course it’s more effort than slapping a logo on a bitcrusher and calling it vintage emu.

oh yeah, absolutely. I’m not saying there aren’t any good plugs out there.
What I’m trying to say is that, nowadays, technical accuracy can almost become secondary because the final product is often judged by what the end user imagines the original hardware should sound like.
There’s a nice word that describes what drives it: anemoia - imagination based nostalgia or nostalgia for an experience you never personally lived through. In other words, you could build a heavy, complex, SPICE-level emulation using modified nodal analysis that brings the user’s CPU to its knees, and there would still be a bunch of people saying it sounds like shit simply because the plugin’s skin doesn’t look “convincing” enough. given all of that 7 out of 10 they will choose that "modified bitcrusher" as long as it looks nice and sounds somewhat as the gear they heard somewhere on youtube short. I've seen it all lately

dustyslices wrote:..nowadays, technical accuracy can almost become secondary because the final product is often judged by what the end user imagines the original hardware should sound like.
There’s a nice word that describes what drives it: anemoia - imagination based nostalgia or nostalgia for an experience you never personally lived through…

There’s also psychoacoustics where the mind influences how we hear things. This came into play when reverbs became more accurate and realistic representations of true sounds in spaces like rooms and halls. They were more realistic than the old reverbs but people didn’t like them. The theory is we heard the old not realistic reverbs on songs we liked while growing up, and we expect to hear reverb in songs that way still. So that’s why a realistic reverb doesn’t sound as “good” as a classic Lexicon to music listeners.

Same thing with tape sat and vinyl limitations. It sounds like music so we like it despite not being high fidelity.

I don’t do sample based music so I don’t have a dog in this fight. But I’m not sure I can hear the difference between samples from an old MPC and 3.0 now. But my ears are also shot from spending way too much time in nightclubs and my earlier cars with stupid sound systems. EeeeeeEEEEeeeeeEEEeeeeeERREERerr

My wife can’t even tell the difference between data saver Pandora and the high quality stream settings, I imagine most people don’t care.

I don't have an old MPC but I have a couple old samplers and they sound different in terms of what they do when you sample hot into the ADC, how the sample transposition works, what kind of filtering they use to prevent aliasing, etc. It's true that there aren't many people who can discern whether a modern MPC emulating an old MPC actually sounds like it, but there are MANY people who want to buy a machine with the REPUTATION for being able to accurately emulate it. For a modern MPC to get that rep, Akai will have to do a solid emulation and have a youtuber with a following A/B against old MPCs and "certify" it. IMO.

dustyslices wrote:

johnnytravels wrote:I think Tal sampler has a convincing variable playback emulation in their sampler.
But of course it’s more effort than slapping a logo on a bitcrusher and calling it vintage emu.

oh yeah, absolutely. I’m not saying there aren’t any good plugs out there.
What I’m trying to say is that, nowadays, technical accuracy can almost become secondary because the final product is often judged by what the end user imagines the original hardware should sound like.
There’s a nice word that describes what drives it: anemoia - imagination based nostalgia or nostalgia for an experience you never personally lived through. In other words, you could build a heavy, complex, SPICE-level emulation using modified nodal analysis that brings the user’s CPU to its knees, and there would still be a bunch of people saying it sounds like shit simply because the plugin’s skin doesn’t look “convincing” enough. given all of that 7 out of 10 they will choose that "modified bitcrusher" as long as it looks nice and sounds somewhat as the gear they heard somewhere on youtube short. I've seen it all lately

know what you mean, probably why nothing in terms of retro emu on the new mpcs actually sounds anything like the real deal…
and yet I think that this is what would actually make me upgrade to a newer mpc, certainly not tape emulations, fake vintage romplers, ring the alarm and stem separation lol
Really wonder why inmusic doesn’t wanna capitalise on Akai legacy tech. Shouldn’t be too hard and would make a lot of vintage tech somewhat obsolete (and the new boxes more desirable)

johnnytravels wrote:Really wonder why inmusic doesn’t wanna capitalise on Akai legacy tech. Shouldn’t be too hard and would make a lot of vintage tech somewhat obsolete (and the new boxes more desirable)

Great question!
If they could, they would. Why make a bad version of the SP12 when you can make good version of a in house Akai sampler like the 950? Maybe that's coming during gen2.
I can can see Akai selling the better emulations as a "Retro Pro Pack".

Is there a good YouTube video I can watch to hear side by side comparisons of old MPC to new to know what I’m missing?

JethroJethro wrote:Is there a good YouTube video I can watch to hear side by side comparisons of old MPC to new to know what I’m missing?

Tonelab has a bunch:

Every time this topic comes up I picture a room full of people demanding scientific-grade recreations of 30-year-old hardware limitations.

"I need the exact S950 filter behaviour." "Not close. Exact." "And the S1000 time stretch." "And the MPC3000 converters." "And the input overdrive." "And the pitch shifting." "And the aliasing."

"And every undocumented quirk caused by aging electronics and manufacturing tolerances."

Cool. So what you're asking for is a team of DSP engineers to spend years reverse-engineering half the Akai catalogue so your MPC can cosplay as a warehouse full of vintage hardware. Then, naturally, the same conversation immediately pivots to why nobody should have to pay extra for it.

The funny part is how every defect eventually gets promoted to a sacred sonic characteristic.

In 1988: "This filter aliases, the converters distort, and the time stretch sounds broken."

In 2026: "Please recreate these flaws with forensic accuracy or you're disrespecting Akai's legacy."

Even if InMusic released "Authentic S950 Mode" tomorrow, the next thread would be: "It's close, but the phase response at +11 semitones isn't quite right."

Followed by 47 pages of spectrograms, blind tests nobody agrees on, and people claiming they can hear the difference through a YouTube demo recorded on a phone.

We are already at the stage where forum members can apparently identify the exact sampler model used on a hi-hat from an MP3, but somehow nobody can ever pass a blind comparison.

The thing that always gets me is the "Akai legacy" argument. People talk about these machines like they were carved by ancient monks under a full moon. A huge part of Akai's legacy was engineers working around the hardware limitations of the day. Half the "magic" was stuff people would've gladly removed if they had the processing power available at the time.

And let's be honest: nobody actually wants accuracy. If they did, they'd just buy the hardware. What people want is for a modern MPC to sound exactly like their favourite records. That's a completely different request.

Modern MPC users seem to want one box that is simultaneously: An MPC3000, S950, S1000, SP-1200, A tape machine, An SSL console, A DAW replacement, A mastering suite

And if it costs more than a mid-range smartphone, capitalism has failed.

The year is 2041. A thread appears: "Why doesn't the MPC X Mk7 accurately model the unique sonic character of the MPC One Retro Legacy Edition from 2024?"

The cycle is complete.

richie wrote:The year is 2041. A thread appears: "Why doesn't the MPC X Mk7 accurately model the unique sonic character of the MPC One Retro Legacy Edition from 2024?"

The cycle is complete.

This.