Liam Howlett's a legend and no mistake... he was waaaay ahead of his time and inspired a hell of a lot of people (including me). He started off, like most of the early british breakbeat pioneers, as a DJ with a heavy addiction to US hip-hop - most of the beats (if not all) in Experience and Jilted Generation have been built around the same ethos as the Hip-Hop tracks they loved so much back then. Liam would most likely have either sampled the original breakbeats from old funk records (as the hip-hop producers did), or he would have lifted some beats off his favourite hip-hop tracks (don't even bother asking me which beats he got from where cos I'm still trying to find a few of them myself ). After he got his beats he would have time-stretched the audio, chopped the beats into various parts (they didn't have recyccle or anything like that in those days!!) and added compression, EQ, filtering etc. But...that was then, I doubt he got any of his samples cleared for the early albums, nowadays there's no way you could realease an album as popular as The Prodigy Experience without clearing all the samples first. But yeah, to answer your question, Liam is unlikely to have played those beats in, he almost definately used breakbeats which he then manipulated to fit in with the faster more dance orientated framework of big-beat or breakbeat (whatever you want to call it).