In 1984,^[8] a new division of the company^[9] was formed to focus on the manufacture and sale of electronic instruments, and was called Akai Professional.

The S612 12-bit digital sampler in 1985, was the first in a series of (relatively) affordable samplers already in 19-inch studio-rack format but in black color.^[10] It held only a single sample at a time, which was loaded into memory via a separate disk drive utilizing Quick Disk 2.8-inch floppy disks. The maximum sample time at the highest quality sampling rate (32 kHz) was one second.

The introduction of a “professional” range of digital samplers began with the 12-bit S900 in 1986,^[10] followed by the X7000 keyboard sampler in 1986,^[14] and the S700 rack-mount version in 1987.^[10] Unlike the single-sample S612, however, they allowed the use of six active samples at once, had a built-in disk drive and could be extended with six individual outputs via cable and a flash memory extension which added another six samples to the memory for multisample playback. The S700/X7000 sampler series were light-grey colored, which didn’t change throughout the whole “professional” range of Akai samplers.

The 16-bit Akai S1000 series followed in 1988, adding the option to read CD-ROMs and write to hard disks via SCSI. This range was superseded by the S3000 series in 1993, with optional built-in CD-ROM drive, followed by the S5000 and S6000. Additional releases of note were the Z4 and Z8 24-bit 96 kHz samplers.^[10]