Whats real y'all. I put one down last night and its nice. But it could have been better. I did the whole thing in the 2500, because I can't get the sync situation fixed. Nobody can. Here are some pros and cons of working with the 2500 (I also work with the MV8000).
The Good:
I think the sound quality is great. I haven't used the famed 2000XL or the 4000, but in my years of experience thing joint sounds beautiful. I had heard about what MPCs do for snares and its true. They just pop. The sequencer is mad tight. No comparison in any other beat machine, sampler or DAW. At the end of the night, the track sounds really good. Sometimes on the MV, because it has a lot of features, you try to use them, but they all don't work great so you lose sound quality and shit. But with the MPC, things are laid out more simply and once you get to know where things are, everything comes together nicely. It lacks some features of the MV but I'm much more happier with this track than any other that I've done on my MV.
The Bad:
I have a few pops that show up on playback monitoring. Believe y'all I got years of engineering and production experience so I know about crossover frequencies and I use a parametric eq to "clear space" for each instruments specific frequency range. Don't know why hardware would have these pops like DAWs, but its minimal and a monitoring effect rather than a true signal effect. Also the lack of a vga mouse setup tells me that Akai is not being progressive. That's an easy one, especially if they create a nice sequencer GUI to go along wit.
The Ugly:
I'm using OS 1.1 because I was being faithful from all of th posts that that OS allows proper syncing to either protools or cubase SE. NOPE!! I created the beat on the MPC. That's all of my percussive instrumentation for the track. I then used Reason to add melodies with several dope refills i got for the Triton and Motif from Flossmodestudios. Great sounds y'all. When I trigger Reason with the MPC it flawless sync. I used some delays and effects from Reason y'all and the joint was just beautiful. Done right. NOPE. To get this all together right, I need to dump my MPC tracks to DAW, with Reason Rewire and everything can then be properly mastered digitally. Well, the ugly issue is of course no way to get syncing with the DAW to record the MPC data as audio so I'm f'ed. This killed me for days. I finally decided to dump the Reason tracks as audio (8 bar loop) wav files and import them into the MPC using USB. It worked, in the end. But not after finding out that the MPC USB function (I use Mac OSX) is funky, no pun indended. I got buzzes, and then there would be no connection without restarting my computer and shutting down the MPC. I lost mad creativitiy energy dealing with this. Its probably better in the later OS's, but then they don't do any kind of syncing, do damned if you do, damned if you don't. Also when the USB died, I would lose audio output on the MPC and would have to restart. I lost samples, time and sequencing events when this USB problem arose.
Finally about 3am everything came together, I got everything loaded, sampled, sequenced, saved and finished the track sounded great. And me and my MPC got to really know each other. I love this machine now. Of course you can only love something and someone when you've been through the storm together. This track was a storm and we got through it together.
I know this is a long post, but I just wanted to share an experience with y'all from a new MPC2500 user. I'll post the track in a couple dayz on myspace. I also would like to know what your "good, the bad, and the ugly" feelings are about the MPC2500. One Love.
I should have shopped online.