Actually for all the accolades the mpc3000 gets for having a warmer sound than the other newer mpc's might even be placebo since the guy who runs midicase.com also repairs mpc's, and said the 2000, and 3000 share the same exact convertors!
So knowing that possibly only the mpc60 will color your sound in any noticable way.
I don't believe it is a placebo.
The first MPC I learned on was the 3000. The other producer I worked with had one. I would borrow it from time to time. I wanted one badly but at that time Akai stopped making the 3000's, so shortly after they made the 2000. I quickly bought one and one of the first thing I noticed was the "sound". I thought that the 2000 sounded "crispy" and that the kicks sounded "weaker" than on the 3000, even when I loaded up some of the drum kits the producer who owned the 3000 gave me.
I thought it was placebo at first myself until one day we where working on a project and he loaded up his equipment in my studio. I had my 2000 plugged into my mackie and he had his 3000 plugged into my mackie and with the same trim settings and no eq or external effects. We had our volume knobs at about 75% up.
There was an obvious difference in the sound even when somewhat trying to match volume levels, the 3000 had a more dominate and cleaner sound, while the 2000 had a bit of almost distortion to it in the high end which made it sound somewhat "crispy" which sounded great on snares but didn't always work right with kicks.
This testing was done before we had spectrum analyzers VST plug-ins (around 1998 or so), so all we could go by was ears.
From what I heard each mpc uses a somewhat different converter and sampling engine.
This might be an mpc rumor but back in the days I never really heard anybody discredit these rumors.
The mpc 60 got its sampling engine from the S900 series samplers
The mpc 3000 got its sampling engine from the S3000 series samplers
The mpc 2000 got its sampling engine from the S2000 series samplers
The mpc 4000 got its sampling engine from the Z series samplers.
Even with that said I also heard that the mpcs also did a bit of filtering in their converters distinguishing the sounds between the mpc drum samplers and their respective rackmount samplers, because with drum samplers transparency wasn't the upmost requirement but whether or not the samples made good drum sounds.
One of the things going on the late 90s was how the mpc 2000 didn't sound as "phat" as the other mpcs, which people said was due to the s2000 being a more "budget" sampler than the S3000 and as a result had cheaper quality a/d and d/a converters.
That said the best emulation you will get of an mpc in the digital world is mainly eqing your samples a bit. It would have been nice back then to see what effects the mpc had on something like a sine wave sweep test, to see what frequencies were being emphasized or deemphasized.
