Yamaha A5000 - Ive owned a lot of samplers over the years but this is the one I always came back to. Started out with an A4000 which I owned for about 6 years and then the A5000 which I just bought over the pandemic. They are incredible samplers capable of some truly beautiful expressive sound, and a large part of that is due to their DACs which is so hard to replicate from software samplers. The only unfortunate thing that plagues this beast is the encoder issue which over time become unresponsive making it incredibly frustrating to work with. At the moment Im using a virtual controller to get around this but it slows things down a bit and takes the fun out of working with the unit directly.

At this point there is very little reason to own a hardware sampler in my opinion. However, for those of us that grew up using them, there is a gratifying factor there that is missing from working with a software sampler.

There is a great write up by Don Solaris here and one from SOS here about the A5000 if anyone is interested in learning more about it.



Here is a video playlist I put together talking about upgrades for the A5000. I'll be adding more about the sampling capabilities soon: