jimmarchi1's Reviews

underwhelming drum amchine for electronic music but a great click track for bands who hate clicks.

If a modest click or beep won't cut it make up a little beat on this guy and print it in mono to the last track of your tape, adat or hard disk....you know, if its 2000. Still have this. Got it as a drum machine, very cheap used. Hated it, broke it out for bands who wanted a click to tape (adat, whatever non DAW format) but disliked the trusty korg beeping metronome. We would make a loop that they liked and ahve at it. Interestingly my friend Phil who has a frickin' grammy has one of these on his ridiculous vintage Neve desk so I'm not crazy.

what were they thinking?

when i think about dumb purchases I made as a young man this is way up there with the pointless ebtech treble elim---- err, I mean hum eliminator.... this has no redeeming qualities. I won't get into details. Sound, itnerface, connectivity. Often when people have lousy cheap gear I think "you got what you paid for." You don't even get what you pay for here. Its not even heavy enough to serve as a doorstop.

cute display but not so hot

apart from the utter lack of professional features like indicidual outs (flaws shared by many of its post 909 siblings) the 505 also suffers from what I would describe as roland's worst sounds... really, its not as nice as the sample based rolands that proceeded it and definitely not a knock on the mediocre but funkily analog 606 and its nothing compared to like a drumulator or even the lowly alesis hr16... if you like this look into the 626, also cheap but I think it sounds a bit better and it has some editing eg tunability.

really nails the purple audio

I never thought I would prefer anything to the waves CLA 1176es but in general I like the brainworks purple more. I'm pretty partial to purple's take on the circuit in hardware anyway. I'm not familiar with the silver and blue 1176, never gotten to use one, but I know the black ones, old urei and UA reissues well and the CLA doesn't do it for me personally. It was good enough, this is better to my ear, especially the nuke really does it for me in parallel on drums. Need snappy fast, colorful compression? Purple.

when you don't need a routing patch bay style splitter

this simple utility box divides your midi signal 8 ways and buffers it and corrects and glitches before sending it out.... all channels go to all outs so don't get it messed up! but its really useful for a static studio setup where every channel is permanent. This thing just works great and runs off the power from the output device!

indispesible

Need a click when tracking to tape or hard disk like Radar or an Alesis HD24? this will do it in a pinch, yeah a drum machine is better, but hey, this served me well printed on track 24 :-)

just yes

this is the most stand out bus comp plugin I've ever used, that includes the shadowhills simulation and the townhouse. Its not right for everything but its always good even when its wrong, so many options... I can't really explain it, there's all these diode settings so I guess its a diode bridge simulation like a super-neve or something.... it has real zazz.... it has character for day, it does not sound like a simualtion AT ALL

limited applications but...

I find this to be over the top for most mixes but when you're doing something big and synthy with bladerunner brass pitch dives this is a good plugin to try if a lexicon hardware unit isn't working. Its very modern the way it combines delays and echoes hard to describe. Great on strings for instance. It took me a long time to be working on soemthing this was right for and if I paid for it I would be giving it like 2 strs, but for free? Its a 5 star because when its right its awesome.

I think I prefer this to the juno 6 and 60

I was never impressed with the polysix until I got one home, but I didn't spend a lot of time with them and mainly did bass sounds. WHOA WRONG. This is like John Carpenter city.... I don't think he used one but everything it does is like a carpenter flick. Real horrorshow. The chorus is cool, the ensemble is wooly and lush.... the phaser is pure horror movie. Okay back this up. Architechture is a juno 6 basically. But it ahs VCOs.... but no high pass... but the modulation is chorus, phaser or string machine ensemble, OTA and BBD stuff, wicked. Dark and moody Also, no simultaneous waveforms, just Saw, Square (adjustable PW) andPWN with its own LFO dedicated. Yup. But no ADSR modulation. Bummer. But still. The SSM oscillators and fitler are midrangey and not upper midrange prophet turn, lower midrange nastiness. And there's this wicked sub oscillator. Divide down 1 or 2 octaves. And and and.... Its simple but capable of snappy plucky, huge strings, pads of weirdness and you name it. anyway. Good synth. I have the kiwi6 mod on mine. I find it to be less abrasive and far more ush than a juno, though less punchy. Don't let anyone say the envelop is less snappy. Its fast and tight. Its deceptive because of the swirly free running VCOs versus retriggering DCOs.

On day 3 I'm giving this another star. Damn does it sound good.

too good

these monitors have fantastic low end, the best of any 6.5" monitor I've ever used. They're clear and detailed when driven by high end converters. They're powerful but sound good at low volumes. Lots of thoughtful fine tuning on the back which coupled with price point makes them a perfect home studio option. Top end? Whoa, its detailed. They seem to have a slight midrange dip which is not a problem but I don't personally like it. They also throw a really wide and diffuse stereo image so I wouldn't mix on them without another playback system. I actually am using them mostly for tracking ebcause the sound off axis sitting at a keyboard is so sweet versus my preferred passive tannoy and yamaha mix monitors that have a small sweet spot because of their accurate stereo imaging. Coupled with an NS10 or PBM6.5 and amp setup I'm really happy with these. I have the big sound for tracking and checking a mix and I can also use my midrangey, directional passives to really get the balance right. Its great to switch to these when soloing in place to get a really detailed and defined representation of a sound that's not sitting, make some tweaks, then go back to the B setup and listen, then un-solo. I highly recommend these for a small room. These replaced my trusty Events that have served me since time out of mind. Never looking back.

its a 50 but a bit louder

Unlike 50 and 100 watt 800s (the amp laney almost completely ripped off for the GH series) where the 50 sounds discernably sweeter (generally true of non master heads though more dependent on your taste) the GH100L sounds just like the 50L to me. See my review of the 50. These are excellent rock amps.

great but not a marshall exactly

briefly a backup to my superlead RI... very expensive backup even used. Sounds excellent but the extra features bog down the circuit when you just want a plexi sound. It never quite does the stock plexi thing.... it has its own hot rod character whether you use the extra features or not.

the best current production marshall cab

unless you wanna stack them this is the best marshall cab you can get off the shelf with perfectly good stock speakers.... or they sued to be. They used to have UK greenback RIs, medium magnet, back when celestion only made speakers in the UK. I've had a stock one and one with mediums and old heavy magnet speakers in an x pattern, the midrange cut of the medium magnets in this oversized cab prevented the heavy magnets from drowning out the mediums. I really wish they would do a straight tall. Not that I lug 4x12s anymore.

what can I say?

this is marshall's finest solid state amp... the other lead series solid states don't sound this good. They hit on something. You sued to be able to get these for like 50 bucks at pawn shops. Not sure why I bought one and I don't know what I did with it.

my least favorite ac30 version, but that doesn't mean its bad

I had a late arbiter for some time. The PCB version.They went from handwiring to PCB around the time they ran out of alnico speakers (which were discontinued but when they bought Vox from Vsel, Arbiter got a stock of NOS silver alnicos and most of the handwired arbiters have those as far as I know). Ariter, even before going PCB, went with a solidstate rectifier over the GZ34 giving this amps a pinch more headroom and punch than a JMI ac30. Coupled with blue vox labeled 70s kurt mueller coned G12Ms it was the marshalliest vox ac30 I've ever heard. A very good amp but I was frightened by the PCB in the classic, poorly ventilated ac30 cab and it was just enough louder than any other vox, even with the lower efficiency speakers that I could never let her rip fully, and the medium ceramic magnets just don't produce the rich cleans of the alnico speakers. Perhaps the full compliment of mustard caps added to its unique voice versus my wima equipped 62.... if you believe in capacitor mojo.

excellent value for dollar

Setup was a bit of a hassle and having to update firmware via ethernet is a pain having gone laptop now but overall a great interface. This has a little bit of everything as the centerpiece of your home studio. Lightning fast thunderbolt, decently fast USB, a couple really transparent mic/instrument preamps, 8 line ins and outs for synths.... stereo FX send (you have to use line ins to record and monitor the return though)... dual headphone amps. MIDI. Onboard DSP which I haven't fiddled with too much yet. Expandable with other motu products over AVB or with anybody's preamps and converters over spdif, ADAT/smux or AES/EBU. Paired with a good rack of focusrites over SMUX this thing can do a lot... I'll probably be getting a new one to use as my gateway to the computer with this slaved over AVB when MOTU gets around to making a thudnerbolt3 version. I highly recommend this interface to anyone who doesn't want to get caught up in the apollo plugin racket. If your PC is fast enough to run all your plugins native in real time and you're using a lot of hardware synths like I am at home? Get a MOTU.

pretty good for what it is

6 channel line level 'keyboard mixer'... had oen of these as a kid to replace a similar knob laden 4 channel radioshack mixer in the early to mid 90s. Purchased for like $40 from barracks trading post on street road just north of the philly line (no 1% city sales tax). I remember this being a distinct step up in sound quality from a realistic mixer LOL.... the pots were nice, you had simple high and low shelves that sounded okay and those big 70s VUs were very helpful. I actually used this to make little submixes of live performances onto 2 tracks of a 4 track to avoid having to bounce and degrade quality. So I would get 6 channels of music sounding good to me, maybe ram into a symmetrix or dbx stereo compressor to smooth out the spikes and then tell the live musicians to do a take and hope everything worked. Or I would have midi going which was easier. At that point I had 2 channels for out front stuff with zero tape generation degradation. But you had to commit. This is what it'll be, print it. I think commonly I would have DI bass guitar, a drum machine and then the other channels were wildcards. The independent output volumes per side could a be a blessing or curse. The straight sound is good, but it excels at being overloaded where it ha more of a fuzzy fibe than anything like this form the late 80s or 90s. Not a hard clip sound really. I really wonder what happened to this.

Also, I always thought it was a KM-6B, that's how it looked to me at the time.

twin peaks

see my review of the peak.... this guy addresses most of my gripes with peak by stacking 2 up with a lot more filter options.... and now you can make your own wavetables. Desert Island jack of all trades... won't replace your prophet or juno, but can do a decent job at bread and butter patches. Warm and nasty or cold and digital, it leans more towards an analog sound than the argon8 but but is thoroughly capable.

sound design beast

imagine a a sophisticated softsynth like serum that has hands on control and better sound quality.... and then some. Big learning curve but worth it.

Update.... I've had it for a week as of tomorrow and every day I like it more.

big and bulky but has a groove

this giant piece of junk, err history... the sounds are super dated PCM samples, big banks of dorky early 90s kits.... but the sequencer has a real feel. Its hard to explain, but the thing grooves. Also, this is pumpkins 1979.