Upgrading Akai S20

Just got myself an Akai S20 off ebay. Looks all in pretty good condition.

Thing is I want to upgrade it cos the 3.5" floppy drive installed would suck for saving all of the 17mb memory (!) that it samples.

I was thinking of totally removing the 3.5" drive out. The drive should be a standard IDE drive I reckon ? and replacing it with an IDE to CF converter.

I was hoping that I can then pop in a 16mb CF card and save directly to the card without messing about with 1.44mb floppies. It would save an awful lot of hassle.

What I wanted to know is has anyone tried anything similar ? Do the Akai samplers equipped with floppy drives have firmware that only save samples in 1.44mb formats ? Is that only restricted because of the floppy capacity or can you just dump the sample dependent only on storage capacity ?

I have made similar modifcations to my Roland VS recorders where i have ripped out the pathetic hard drives and replaced them similarly with IDE to CF converters and then started using Compact Flash memory. They have worked awesomely and have actually imporved those machines performances !

Wow , that sounds like a nifty mod.

You gotta post a pic when your done.

I'll let you know how I get on. I need to open up the machine to see what connectors are inside. Any 40 pin IDE interface will be straightforward. However if it is only a 34 pin floppy controller then it maybe more tricky.

I have an s2000 that i dont use that much, but id love to mod it. was gonna put an internal hard drive into, see an article on the net which someone did before, and a neat job he did. never thought of the CF thing, thats a great idea considering the price of flash memory always droppin..

as for the 34 pin thing, yeah thats a bummer, i heard some guy managed to make a 40-34 pin converter, but thats messy, i have been looking for that type of converter for a while

Yes the machine only has a 34 pin connector inside. It is a floppy controller and it operates a floppy on a single drive configuration so I will have to try source a converter of sorts.

As far as the sampler I am really impressed. It samples at only 32Khz but it sure produces a wonderful sound. Samples and breaks sound lovely out of it.

It isn't an MPC and on first appearances the S20 may seem like a toy in comparison, however it has been limited only by lack of interfaces. In sound terms it delivers for the right kind of music.

I will endeavour to CF mod this thing as it will give it a whole new lease of life.

ekkostar wrote:
I will endeavour to CF mod this thing as it will give it a whole new lease of life.

Please keep me posted on how you get on as i shall follow suit on my s2000

i just sold an s20 on ebay! i used to love that little sampler. It was easy to use and reliable. def post up pics when this is done!

Anyone have modded the akai s20 floppy drive successfuly? I'm curious if a ide zip drive would work..

I would think that this is not an easy task, since it has a standard floppy connection. But people have done more difficult things...

It is a great sampler tho, very bare bones but nice sounding.

I have an old s-20 chillin', That would be cool if you can pull it off.
I don't know if the machine will recognize the CF reader, but if not you can always put the floppy back in.
Keep us s-20 owners updated.


Pe@Ce

I SECOND THAT

I guys, i have a s20 sampler. I saw this product on the web http://www.products4engineers.nl/resour ... ml-pdf.pdf

this unit will work with the machine?