i forget where i got the tray, could have been target, but it was cheap. my 2000xl is actually on top of it in that picture i posted.
i'm glad i got the 2500. i maxed the ram (somewhere around 100 bucks i think), got the cd/dvd drive for free and bought a 100gig hard drive for less than 100 bucks.
i actually don't use the chop shop even though i checked it out, i still chop everything myself, and i also don't do any time stretching. i keep my beats pretty simple... boom bap. the 2000xl was able to time stretch as well, and i never used that option. there were a lot of things on the 2000xl i'm sure i never used.
there's still some bugs with the 2500, but i think the benefits outweigh them in my case. one major flaw that i hope they change in a future OS is the way you trim samples on the 2500. with the 2000, the more you spun the data wheel, the faster the end points moved. with the 2500, each click of the data wheel only moves the end point one position. if you want to move quicker, you either have to use the sliders, or you have to hold shift and click the left cursor button, and it will select the 10's column so that every time you move the data wheel it will move the end point 10 positions.
in other words, if you're start point is 10000 and you move the data wheel to the right by one click, it will change to 10001. if you're at 10000 and hold shift and hit the left cursor button once, and then move the data wheel to the right by one click, it will change to 10010. hold shift and hit the left cursor a second time and the 100's column will be affected. it's a bit of a pain getting used to after having the 2000xl.
pluses are being able to record track mutes to the sequence, direct recording (you can sample while a track is playing and it aligns what you just sampled perfectly to a track in your sequence.. good for things like cuts, or maybe if you're aligning an a capella over your beat for a remix), the filters work well (high pass, band pass and low pass... better than that muffling filter the 2000's have), you can have 4 samples assigned to the same pad (rather than using simult), you can actually write audio cds that will play in a cd player, and you can sample from the mpc's outs as well as directly from cd.
another cool thing is mute groups. with the 2000xl, it was tough to have pads cut off other pads because i think each pad was only able to cut off a max of 3 pads if i remember correctly? if you needed a single pad to be able to cut off 4 pads, you'd have to assign a sample to another pad, turn it's volume down and hit that pad at the same time as the first pad to have it cut off the 4th pad.
with the 2500, i can have 16 different samples on all 16 pads, set all of their mute groups to "1", and every pad will cut eachother off. with the way i chop, this is huge.
also, usb connectivity is key... you can hook the mpc up to your computer, choose which drive you want the computer to be able to read (the internal hard drive on the mpc, the compact flash drive, etc), and the computer sees it as an external hard drive. just drag and drop files, it makes backing up files a breeze.
here's a pic of my setup with the 2500:
http://www.mikefeedback.com/images/setup1152x864.JPG
