I've owned my fair share of grooveboxes/beat machines over the years and I think my priorities have been narrowed down in much the same way yours have. Timing, reliability & integration are very important to me too.
I am using a nice old Yamaha A5000 sampler now (expanded with ADAT/sdif/6 balanced outs), but I'd welcome the chance to own an MPC at some point as well.
As far as grooveboxes go, I feel that NI Maschine has taken it all to a new level now, and then you have things like Spectrasonics RMX with its huge libraries. But these are not hardware solutions, and i can see the reason why you'd like to stick with hardware.
If it were me and I didn't have the Yamaha A5000, I'd probably just buy an AKAI MPC 4k and learn to use it very well.
|