Welcome to the Mad House! Really, really take on board Massive's advice re monitoring, you really cannot know how good anything sounds unless you have a good, accurate reproducing system. There is also the matter of your chosen genre? I know little of it but feel it might be about heavy bass? If so this makes for larger, more expensive monitors and even more extensive treatment of your room and if your room is less than about 1800cu ft (~65cu mtr) you are going to struggle to treat that for even quality bass IMHO. Yes, you CAN use headphones. Models well north of $200 would be useful but many say you ultimately need speakers for the final mix.
That Akai mpk seems to be devoid of any audio outputs. How do you drive your present speakers? I think the mpk is aimed at being part of a "standard" home recording setup? That would consist of an Audio Interface PC and active monitors driven and controlled from the AI. AFAICT you would be relying on the computer's (laptop?) soundcard for that duty. Not good.
The NI Maschine is better in that it has audio ins and outs and MIDI ports and seems to be "most" of an interface anyway but I would still advise adding an AI to your existing setup and IF you do, make sure it has MIDI ports. The Steinberg UR22 gets a good rep and comes with Cubase, nowt better for MIDI work.
As you are "noob One, post One" you may not know much about "Digital Audio Workstations"? DAWs are the software that allows the recording an playback of music (and VASTLY more!) Cubase is one such but there are dozens of them, some are free. Almost all have a trial version and I would suggest you have a look for these on the MAGIX site. One of their Music Maker DAWs might suit?
Dave.
