Hmm, I dont think so when taking in consideration that both Numark and Alesis are tied to non mpc related products and keep Akai Pro pretty much mpc and recorder related. Alesis just released their new synth product line and Numark will stick dj gear, so Akai will pretty much aim at sequencer biased workstation. Not such a bad move when you think about it, the samplers arent that impressive so most pro users would rather stick to their EMU E4xt's, S6000's etc ( leaving a 4k out the perspective - Z4/Z8 ). Second to this is conclusion you can derrive from the mpd sales and the likes by Korg etc that people want the mpc work flow without buying an actual mpc...but still not having the mpc workflow ( duh, its just a controller ). So yeah, its saturated, but not with mpcs, they're just midi controllers whether that keys or pads, its still the same hype about nothing really. From what I've seen in the past few years is that all the software ( vst etc ) gain more midi implentation for external control and what used to be all desktop processing now becomes dedicated to live performance. I can think of a nice setup where the pc/laptop just functions as a sampler/synth, add a hardware recorder to it and you're set with a MPC500. Now think what use would a budget sampler engine have in a setup like this ? Its this what makes a lot a pro users not buy into a mpc but would go looking for a ASQ-10 instead or buy a mpc but would not use its sampler ( like me most of the time ). In all I think its a good idea, but they need to present it properly because ( as with the mpc ) many folks dont know what to use it for.
