Great piece of equipment! Easily ties the pros of both the 303, and the MPc series together with the ease of PC compatbility.Definetly a piece of hardware for beginners and pros alike.

Me: studio musician (keyboards guitars, mandolin)composing "world" style music, children's stories with sound effects, jazz, funk, rock etc.

I got tired of using the cheap sounding drums in my Roland synthesize, so I spent several weeks researching various drum machines, reviews, sound quality, prices etc. I looked at cheap Akai drum machines and expensive Roland, Yamaha, and Akai machines. But the SP606 interested me because it combined sampling capability with drum machine and sequencing ability. The cheapest AKAI had "adequate" sound but was very limited, and of course the best ones out there were very expensive. There are some great Roland drum machines with fantastic sounds for a comparable price, but if you pay just a little more for this, you can have all those sounds AND be able to sample anything else you want.

I've had it now for about two weeks.

It is very simple to use, amazingly intuitive and well laid out. Sampling is absolutely a breeze. I spent several very productive nights with a CD player plugged into it looking for loops from old jazz, reggae, salsa etc albums and had a great time lifting loops. I also bought a sound effect library online that had excellent sampled drums and loaded them into the workstation (be sure to ask for CD's with WAV files! I'm not sure if you can load in other formats). So far I'm very pleased with the machine. The only drawback is the 4 pad/sample simultaneous playback limitation, I wish it could play at least 5 at once, but I'm working around that. Also wish the machine's effects werre a little higher quality, but even the low quality effects have a very unique quality to them. I also wish that you could change the samples by steps (like a keyboard), but you can change the pitch by changing the BPM setting. I love the Cakewalk interface, I connected it to my laptop and it makes a great interface for creating grooves. I'll have MANY hours of fun with that! Overall, great product for the price.

I got the sp-606, and ive only had it for about a week. It's been working pretty well but i still haven't discovered all of the features yet because the manual is a piece of crap. The pads are really easy to press and the beat making takes one sec due to the "quantize function". Overall, this machine is a good buy.