The Akai S3000XL is a 16-bit professional stereo igital sampler. The instrument has 32 polyphonic voices, and 2 MB of built-in RAM. While this may not seem like much compared to today's standards, when the S3000XL was released, it was top of the line. For adding sounds to the sampler, the S3000XL featured a 3.5" floppy drive that read Akai-formatted floppies only, and a SCSI port to link with an external storage device, such as a zip drive for storage of longer, or more samples. The built-in 2 MB of RAM could be upgraded to 32 with a chip that Akai provided. Other upgrades included various extra cards such as the EB-16 & IB-304f. The S3000XL had 8 outputs, and two 1/4" inputs, allowing for the S3000XL to operate as a hard disk recorder. The interface consisted of 32 buttons, eight of which were function keys, three knobs, and a four-key directional pad for navigating the 620x240 display, located in the upper-middle portion of the sampler.