Will forward these comments to my brother. He's a long time digital producer although I'd be hard pressed to get him to mix together ambient/electronic/d&b/whateverIlove.
Sounds like a pretty sick and expensive setup. Nice job putting it all together.
Actually, I bought the mixer after I couldn't split about 10 signals to the soundcard any more! I had splitters going into splitters and it was a mess.
Then the mixer I bought had FX inputs, so I bought the outboard FX units. Then I read about the S950 and bought 2 . They have 8 outputs which you can run through a mixing desk and EQ, adjust gain and volume, and even put an FX unit on a drum.
The great thing is all this equipment was bought on eBay in just a couple of months.
I put together a spreadsheet of the costs. The Akai's, mixers and effects units came to about £1000. The Xpander wasn't cheap, but I bought that in 2004. The organ was about £200 including postage.
But the point is, you can build a retro studio quite cheaply and experiment.
I'm impressed that you still use hardware samplers. It's pretty much the first thing that I would think of replacing with a computer (quasi unlimited sampling memory, unlimited storage, etc). I have a S2000 somewhere, gathering dust...
Sounds like a pretty sick and expensive setup. Nice job putting it all together.