Alesis MIDIVERB II 16 Bit Digital Effects Processor

This devil in 19-inch clothing comes from the people who brought you the MIDIVERB and Microverb, two outstanding products in a market where the words 'cheap' and 'quality' are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, let alone about the same product. It's the sign of a smart company when, instead of building a reputation on a couple of products and then sitting back for a round of applause, they proceed to make something better and cheaper than ever before.

The MIDIVERB II is a 16-bit digital reverb/effects unit, does a remarkable impression of a flanger, chorus, and reverb/echo, has 99 preset programs, 32 MIDI patch locations and will cost you only £429.

ON THE FACE OF IT

Taking the MIDIVERB II out of its box for the first time was a bit of a surprise. I'd always only seen it from the front and assumed it would have a very deep case, like most other 19-inch rackmounts I've seen. In actual fact it's a very trim box indeed, with three knobs on the front covering Input, Output and Mix, an LED display, and 14 'dead flesh' rubber pushbuttons. On the rear you've got a footswitch jack marked Defeat, MIDI In and Thru DINs, and a pair each of stereo Input and Output jacks, of the ¼" persuasion. Power is supplied to the unit by what looks like a calculator power pack, with a very thin cable terminating in a microjack, which plugs in-between the MIDI sockets and the footswitch.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

Lurking on the PCB inside the MIDIVERB II is a 16-bit linear PCM convertor, running in a RISC environment with a custom-built VLSI chip (clocked at a snappy 8MHz) which, unless you've got ears like a bat, is as clean as you're likely to need, buddy. Seriously though, although anything you can't hear won't hurt you, having as little as 0.1% distortion isn't bad, and it gives you that ultra-clean, digital sound that people love so well. Some other interesting specs are as follows: the effect bandwidth is 15kHz, input impedance is about 1 Mohm per channel (making 500Kohms in mono) and it can take input signal levels of between -10 and +20dBv.

There are 99 preset effects supplied (plus defeat), featuring 29 very natural sounding reverbs, 10 gated reverbs, 10 reverse reverbs, 20 echoes, 10 flanges, 10 choruses and 10 miscellaneous effects. That's a lot of stuff, and it's all as easy to use as the remote control on your video. Okay, so you can't alter any of the programs, stepping the reverb up and down in infinitessimal graduations... but there are more different room sizes than you'll ever really use here, so who needs to, hmm?

The dynamic range, a statistic so frequently bandied about by audio salespersons, is a whopping 85dB. Right, so much for the physics of the situation, how does it sound?