What is the difference between the two? Can the 16-bit mode of S2400 be comparable to that of MPC3000? Can it accomplish the same tasks as MPC?
welcome to the forum.
ask yourself what are you trying to accomplish? what workflow are you used to? give the community more info on your background of music production, so responses can cater to your needs, rather than just tossing out endless generic responsesā¦
the 2400 and the MPC 3k have different sound characteristics as well as workflows.
they are both samplers and sample sound. they can both add their own character and charm to the sound, so yes they can both accomplish the same tasks. the s2400 can do a lot more than what the mpc 3K can do. Do you need those extras or not? thats up to you to decide.
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Iām coming from MPC One and Ableton. I just wanted to buy an old sampler to try out first. I want to add the characteristics of sp1200 to my drum kit. The legend of mpc3000 also attracted me
i have the 3000 and S2400. whatās good?
I own an S2400, and have owned/currently own most of the older MPCās (inc the MPC 3000) (and the modern ones).
My take on it is that the MPC 3000 is just not worth it in 2025 to purchase. Even reissues are 25+ years old, and most of the ones on the market need work - which is added expense if you canāt do it yourself. The modern ones (your MPC One) can do the āMPC 3000ā sound quite nicely, the only thing youāre getting from it (the 3000) is bragging rights, aesthetics, and an old-style workflow (that might not, read, probably wonāt suit you if youāre new school)
The S2400 is a much more modern machine, that captures a vintage vibe and sound; has a really easy workflow - and is just inspiring to make music with; is supported very well by ISLA; and will save you a few Ā£Ā£ā¦ for me itās so immediate, and puts a huge smile on my face every time I flip the power on
Iād really strongly advise the S2400 is the way to go. Keep your MPC One to work alongside it. If you really, really must have the āMPC 3000ā sound - the cheapest way to do this is to score an Akai S2800 rack sampler (this has the same sound engine as the MPC 3000)
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Completely agree with every point made. In the year 2025, the only edge that my 3000 holds over the S2400, in my opinion, is its sequencer. But that holds true when I put it up against most sequencers. Itās renowned for how tight and precise it is, but just not worth 2025 prices for someone looking to grab one and work off of on a consistent basis.
One thing I donāt hear the āpuristsā talk enough about (well two things) is the reality that when you have a machine like an MPC-3000 or SP-1200, at some point or another, youāre going to need to invest in outboard gear to really get the sound that youāre after or put the final touches on the ideas that you come up with. Even if itās simple EQ and compression. These arenāt a one and done purchase. Yes, you could always record into your DAW and apply various effects to the sounds, but at that point, you might as well have something like an S2400, which I feel, sonically, sits somewhere in between those two machines but has the functionality of a more modern piece of gear AND effects, now that the DSP card is available. Also, youāll need to buy a Zip drive and Zip disks for a 3000, which corrupt easily. And the price of a decent condition drive is crazy these days. Usually around $250-$400 compared to $30 used back in the day. You really wanna deal with that?
My first decade of making music was spent on the MPC-3000 and for part of that time, I also had an SP-1200 and S950 just for making drums. I eventually made the move to Maschine because my ideas were dying faster than these machines could work. Getting the Maschine to sound as good as the 3000 on a baseline level was a task and a half, though, and I ended up sampling with it and then resampling into Maschine.
Being reliant on a computer screen was starting to affect my creativity and I yearned to return to creating with my ears. My 3000 now needs repairs done, the MPC Live left a lot to be desired and then I heard about this S2400. The rest is history.
I had my S2400 on the shelf for a good year because of its lack of effects, but this new DSP card is a complete game changer. I get the thump that only an older machine can give AND effects capabilities to help me āfinishā ideas before tracking them out for mixing. My 3000 and MPC-2500 (got that a while ago) are back on the shelf now and are kinda unnecessary. And I couldnāt be happier. A friend of mine recently got a 950 in a record collection he bought and he offered it to me for insanely low. I could potentially grab it but havenāt yet because deep down, I know that I donāt need it. Itās overkill and would be more headache than I want to deal with in this day and age.
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Iām not really interested in the sound of the 3000, I just want an old-school workflow and old-school thinking.Does the S2400 help with this?
I know what you mean, I do all my post production through my computer UAD, no matter what machine I choose to buy. I have a twin x now, and after I buy the machine I will buy a mixer or ADDA to access my daw
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Absolutely. While the there are some āmodernā features on the S2400 (esp. with roll out of the DSP card) much of the workflow of the S2400 is both āold schoolā and unique unto itself. Just like the legendary machines of the 90s. Iāve said this before and Iāll say it againā¦.the S2400 will go down in history as a legendary unit that stands shoulder to shoulder with the 3000 and 1200. Iām actually happy that it isnāt a direct clone of the 1200, too. It has a sound and personalty all its ownā¦.which is something most modern machines lack.
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Oh and one last thought. I know that you mentioned not wanting the 3000 or 2400 for the sound and instead for the workflow. I think that youāll find, really quickly, on the 2400 and 3000 that sound has a direct impact on workflow. Machines like the 3000 and 2400 have what I like to call ābutterā. No matter the sound source, all the samples get coated in this nice kind of āsauceā. Itās literally the sound of the machine coloring the samples. When you go from using machines like that to a DAW like, say, Ableton or Maschine, a lot of the workflow, in my opinion, tilts towards trying to coax a āsoundā out of it, or at least trying to make everything sound cohesive. I feel like thatās limiting for me, creatively, and not in a good way. Working in these boxes, Iām not having to spend near as much time trying make it sound good, and am able to use that energy expanding upon my ideas and sketches.
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So to me the main differences between modern samplers like the S2400/MPC X/Live/One and the old OGs, SP-1200, MPC 60/3000 are:
- Sound Colouring: how clean is the ADDA conversion? Do i get artifacts from sampling when hitting into the ADs with hot signals? Were there preferred usecases in mind when it was designed?
- ā In my experience the old machines have more prominent sound colouring because they were either designed for specific usecases (SP-1200/MPC 60 ā Drum Sampling) or their hardware could rely much less on software/digital enchancements due to the computational limitations back then, therefore less ICs and more solid state in the circuitry that allows colouring the sound even if signals get hot. Digital signals will clip, analog signals and solid state circuitry will have a more physical response when going to extremes, if this makes any sense. To me this is one of the main reasons why i can sample stuff relatively hot and still get outcomes, that result in musical artifacts rather than ones where compression and digital limits mainly affect the result. For instance, if i push my S950 AD with a hot signal i get a burned/crunchy/musically distorted signal where as if i push the ADs on my MPC2500/MPC One i get outcomes that miss these musical characteristic and kinda sound off in my opinion. Still the MPC2500/MPC One is way more clean in the sense: what you record is pretty much what it will put out (if fx are left out etc).
- ā Here the S2400 can keep track because of the filter chips and the circuitry that was focused on achieving that classic sound when (re)sampling with the classic engine, it colours your sound in a musical way
- Feature Set - Limited vs Endlessly Packed: The old samplers have hard limits. Fact. SP has very primitive Hold/Decay envelopes, you either adjust tuning or decay but not both at once. 8 channels, 8 voice at total in parallel, signals on each channel are mono, no poly possible (MPC 60 has poly per channel, on the other hand). Limited memory: 10s for the SP-1200 (20s for the Rossum) Sampling Time, 2-2.5s per pad, MPC 60 has 26s with expanded memory which you can spend all on one pad with 3.1 OS, you can also compress all samples to make that 52s if i am correct. This simply forces you to find solutions if these limits donāt work for your idea. Hence why people came up to spin the vinyl at 45RPM and max pitch adjust so to get the most out of the 2s they had for sampling. Pitching down, et voila, you figured out a way to handle the hardware limits which by accident also makes the machines characteristics more prominent sounding: you get that ring, that sometimes comes up when tuning up/down a semitone and disappears again when you tune up/down another semi. The modern samplers simply have none of these extreme limits, you have 20mins+ Stereo high quality sampling time, you can program/sample whatever you want for how long you want (20 mins is a loooooooot of sample time if you consider your usual loops running a couple to 10 seconds at most and your oneshots seldomly expand behind 2 seconds except for those long reverby notes/vocals.).
- ā With that in mind i have to say that i learned so much more about the fundamentals of making music/choosing/trimming samples with those old machines then i would have with the new ones simply because i had less stuff i could do and therefore less stuff to learn at once/be distracted by. I often times found myself trying to polish a turdy sample with all kinds of fx my MPC One brought to the table just to ultimately succumb to the fact that the idea wonāt work and none of the fx in the world would make that shitty sample go sound like i wanted it to sound simply because i choose the wrong sample for my idea. When i started getting into the older samplers their limits rather became sort of guidance for me: there was not much functionality that had to be learned on those machines, they could be used through shear muscle memory and your ear while the new ones bloat you with touchscreens and all kinds of visual representations. Once i knew the machines limited feature set i could focus more on the music i tried to put into and ultimately out of the machine: how should i set my mixer EQ for that particular sample such that i can layer it with the other one? which playback speed/pitch sounds nice while also allowing to tune the sample to my sampled drum breaks BPM? where should i lay those ghost notes/ear candies when double timing my sequence? I found myself way more confronted with BPMs, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 notes, swing (like trimming the samples such that they do not start exactly on the attack of the sampled sound but rather leave some space here and there to get a more funky feel to it) rather than learning the Xth feature and Yth filter with their Zth parameter. All in all i got a better musical understanding and trained my ear more
- ā Again the S2400 scores here: it is a nice middleground since you get all the modern features while you are still able to muscle memory your way through without needing the display too much. Without the DSP there is no much features you need to learn, it has the basics: nice ADSR envelopes, LP/BP/HP filtering, hifi/classic engine (and of course lot more of other ease of use features as sample copying (try that with an SP-1200/MPC 60, only with workaroundy ways this can be achieved, sometimes just sampling it again is the faster wayā¦ what was the record and my mixer EQ setting back then? darnā¦ inconvenience but also a chance to get more variation to your beat, its crisis and chance at the same time!) and lots more).
- ā While for the beginning i can heartily recommend the old machines, i think one should go with the S2400 nowdays because it has a nice middle ground between those two worlds: the fundamentals and endlessly feature packed. Because once you know your machine, you understand the fundamentals and your skills grow, you will yearn for more features (proper EQs, proper (filter) envelopes, proper sample copy mechanisms, more sample time, nice compressors, nice reverbs, nice delays) and either invest in outboard gear ($$$) or get a machine that has that in the box
I could go further and further but i think the two points illustrate the differences between old and new machines from my experience and perspective.
To also particularly answer your question: I do not own an MPC3000 but i heard often times that people are underwhelmed because how ācleanā it sounds compared to the SPs and MPC60s of this world. After all it has 16bit/44.1khz sampling which is early CD quality. So the Sound Colouring is not that prominent of a feature here, the MPC3000 is rather known for its sequencer/swing and the nice digitally controlled analog LP filters (one on each voice, kinds comparable to those in the Akai S950, damn what would i give for those filters in the MPC60, damn you, Roger Linn!). And if you compare the prices: MPC3000 with max ram, in good condition, serviced ā 4kā¬-5kā¬ and above while the S2400 gives you a lot more bang per buck.
Also what i forgot to mention: old machines, old hardware. If you go down the old machines track you better learn some soldering, research proper replacement parts and find a synth doctor of your choice in your country, you will need to maintain those babies properly or either pay a lot of money to somebody who can do this. Again this is a chance: i learned alot about those things when installing the LPFC03 on my SP-1200, or soldering on new omron tact switches, changing US for world wide capable PSUs in the MPC60, etc etc, but you either need money or a knack for this.
And for credibility, i own: Rossum SP-1200, Akai S950, MPC60MKii, MPC2500, MPC One and of course S2400 
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Great take Barvarian. Appreciate this!
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My beatmaking equipment has been:
1995-2010: ASR-10
2010-2023: MPC 2000 XL + S950 + ASR-10
2023-now: S2400
I have zero desire to use any of my other machines since I got the Isla. It gives me the traditional sampler workflow, but is so much more efficient and fun. Thereās only a couple of things I miss:
- The āFull Levelā button on my MPC 2000XL
- The āsoundā of the 950 and ASR
- I occasionally miss how the MPC sequencer *moves or *swings as people like to say, but I absolutely adore the sequencer on the Isla. Itās so much fun.
I would recommend considering how heavily you rely on having 16 pads directly in front of you, because having 8 pads per bank is a very different experience.
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If you turn off ādynamic padsā itās more or less the equivalent of MPC āfull levelā, the difference being the level is set with the faders and the hit always registers as max level. I much prefer to use it this way and then switch to ālevelā mode to hit other velocities - set with the 8 faders.
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The S2400 swing algorithm is exactly the same as the MPC.
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It doesnāt feel like that to me, but Iām not a technical guy, just ears and head bops. Is it possible to do the ānegativeā swing settings like on the MPC (i.e. earlier vs later)?
I appreciate the suggestion, thank you. When I use the MPC, I turn the āFull Levelā off and on during the recording of a sequence, depending on how I want something like a kick drum to be recorded. As I type this, Iām realizing that most people may not do this, so it may just be something that I like doing personally. Accessing Dynamic Pads just requires more steps than the MPC, which may be an issue for only me. Again, I loveā¦and I mean LOVE sequencing on the Isla. Having spent a decade plus on the ASR-10 sequencer, the Isla is a freaking dream.
I see what you mean. To clarify the workflow - you donāt need to repeatedly access Dynamic Pads, just untick it (ie OFF) once in the global settings, set and forget.
Now use ālevelsā button on the left of the S2400, and control your dynamics per sample as you sequence - the equivalent of your MPC āfull levelā is having the fader at max.
Alternatively use ālevelsā + āmultimodeā which willl spread out a single sample over the 8 pads, where you use the faders to set the levels - 05:00 on this video:
Sorry if you already know this, just wanted to make sure I was being clear.
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Thanks for your reply, I still canāt convince myself. I decided to buy both, learn them in a year and sell one.