A Sound Design journey from 1995 through to the millennium! Akai S-2000 to the rescue?

Comparing the Akai S2000 and Turtle Beach Monterey, they’re pretty different animals. The Akai S2000, released around ’95, is a rackmount sampler with 2 megabytes of base RAM, expandable to 32 megabytes, and it handles sampling at 22 to 44.1 kilohertz in mono or stereo, 16- or 8-bit. You could load samples, edit them with tools like time compression, pitch shift, looping, or velocity effects, and map them across keys for full patches. Its workflow was hands-on but clunky due to a small LCD, often needing external software like a PC editor for deeper tweaks. It was built for studio production, great for layering sounds or crafting instruments, used by folks like Moby. The Turtle Beach Monterey, from ’94, is a PC sound card combo of the Tahiti and Rio daughterboard. The Rio’s ICS 2115 chip gave 24-voice polyphony at 44.1 kilohertz or 32 voices at 32 kilohertz, using ROM-based wave table samples plus up to 12 megabytes of RAM for custom .WAV files. Its workflow leaned on Windows software like WaveSculpt to load and edit samples, but it was more about playback than deep sound design—think General MIDI patches for MIDI controllers or DAWs. It was less flexible, with basic modulation and no real-time sequencing or morphing. The S2000 is a dedicated sampler with robust editing for custom sounds, while the Monterey’s more of a playback-focused MIDI synth tied to a PC. The wavestate SE, as we discussed, blows both out of the water with its Wave Sequencing 2.0, 64 voices, and real-time control, making it closer to a modern synth than either of these ’90s tools.