Askia Shaheed wrote:^^^
Nice pics. I have mine is a similar position sitting next to my Fantom G. But I have to take a commerical break and make another gripe about my Fantom G.
As a consumer and member of several forums, I have always been forthcoming about what I like and dislike about certain products. This includes products I own like the MPC-line. The Fantom Gs OS is still incomplete. Today I discovered another annoying issue. The Fantom G's manual states that songs can be saved as Standard Midi Files, which is a function that most or all MIDI sequencers have. But not the Fantom G. I have songs created entirely with the Fantom G. I wanted to save them as a Standard Midi File to load into my 5k for further editing and music composition but this isn't possible...yet Roland has advertised this 
Back to the MPC 5K....
Find it hard to believe that the Fantom G doesn't support that as a 'standard' MIDI feature - that ones' a biggie.
You sometimes wonder who these companies have got doing their OS specification design/testing - sometimes it's beyond belief how they update a product to a new 'improved' model then drop key features that were available on previous models, specifically the Fantom X which could perform standard MIDI files import/export.
I know that they've revamped the onboard sequencer on the Fantom G but you'd really assume that this would be a 'must have' feature for working on MIDI tracks between different equipment.
What can I say except 'THAT SUCKS!!!' - Roland need to step up their sh;t !!!
But I suppose you could always trade it in for an MV....lol
Anyway... as you say.... back to the MPC5K
Ok, I have to admit, first impressions of the 5K are actually good, I've been messing with this VA synth and without reading too much of the manual I've already started to get some really impressive results - At some point soon we perhaps should think about starting a new thread on here, just to share and compare our home-made 5K synth presets, it would be neat to see what others are managing to achieve.
For me this is a really nice feature, even though I have ample dedicated hardware/software synths. I do like the instant gratification of building a beat and then without moving away from the 5K, layering a nice ARP'd analog baseline that syncs exactly to my BPM and you can tweak in real-time right from the Qlinks - I was just playing for hours last night with that feature alone.
Sound quality also is good, not sure if it's the new effects, but it's sounding pretty sweet through my JBLs.
Today, I'm gonna rebuild my sample library which I'd backed-up from my 2500 onto the 5K - Not sure how long 30gb will take over USB....lol
Oh I almost forgot to mention my CD issue - As reference for others - On my MPC2500 I was using a 3rd party TEAC drive with the pin-removal fix (so not the original Akai CD/DVD). That worked great on the 2500
When I put that same drive into the 5K it didn't recognise it, so I'm wondering if the 5K is using some other pin config which is slightly different between the two models (or perhaps some different master/slave setup between CD/DVD and HDD?)- Either that or there could be a hardware issue on my 5K, but it's brand new so I'm covered anyway. I thought it would just work as it was fine on the 2500 though.
Just wondered if any other 5K owners with the CD/DVD have used a 3rd Party drive, or if everyone's using the official Akai product?
I'm not gonna mess with it though - I've taken the drive back out and I'm just gonna go ahead and buy the Akai drive, I figure that if it's worth investing in the flagship MPC, then it's probably best to get the Akai accesories for full compatibility.
Peace - Elite
The Roland Forum pretty much mimics this one in terms of how people feel about these specific products. But there is a big difference though. The Roland Forum is filled with a bunch of actual Fantom G users that complain about the product they own. This isn't the case here where most of the people that complain about the 5K don't actually own the machine. I have used MPCs for over a decade. And until recently, I was an MPC 2500 user w/ the JJ OS2 installed. I can't see why anyone that loves MPCs would hate this product. Overall, it is a solid machine. It has everything you need to make music with. If you find that it doesn't..simply discuss it in the feature request threads.
