SOUND ON SOUND
Alesis brought us Air FX, a motion-controlled effects unit, just before they ran into financial trouble in 2001, so the planned synth version never really appeared at the time. Now that they're back, the Air Synth is with us at last...
PMI's second Grandioso library takes a thorough approach to capturing every nuance of a Bösendorfer Imperial 290 concert grand piano.
DVD-Audio offers high-resolution digital audio and surround sound, but authoring packages have been too costly for the home studio - until now.
Fostex enter the card-based multitracker market with a bang, offering eight tracks of uncompressed CD-quality audio from a single Compact Flash card.
Two surprisingly affordable units from a premium name in high-end valve processing.
Alesis continue to show us how to cram big spaces into ever smaller boxes!
5***** We check out the mighty Fender Rhodes 73 Stage Piano, brought to you in a new 3GB sampled version by the Danish company Scarbee.
Drawmer's affordable new combination of master clock and sample rate converters provides an ingenious solution for high-quality digital interfacing in the home studio.
These two small-diaphragm mics from Shure provide solid all-round performance with an extended low-end response.
Steinberg and Wizoo's latest collaboration aims to provide high-quality string sounds at an affordable price, with a software interface to make string arranging so easy that even drummers can manage it. Have they succeeded?
Swissonic's high-quality preamp and A-D converter caters for 24-bit/96kHz digital audio in AES-EBU and ADAT formats.
The monotimbral K-Station offered keyboard players an affordable Novation -- but now, for a bit more money, the company have released the KS4 and KS5, which add plenty of new features, better keyboards and multitimbrality. The perfect marriage at the perfect price? We find out.
WaveMachine Labs' sophisticated DirectX plug-in allows you to replace the sounds of individual drums with samples, while keeping the human feel of a performance.
**** Score = 4/5. Many libraries offer a French horn ensemble within their menu of brass sections, but this is the first horns-only release we've come across.
The successor to the MRS1044 has more of everything - tracks, inputs, sounds - at a very similar price. But with new fierce competition, is there still room for a Zoom?
Score = ***** 5/5 stars. Garritan has released GOS Lite, a three-CD version of GOS available in either Akai or Giga formats using samples from the full library.
The processing from the Maxxbass plug-in is now available in hardware format.
Kurzweil are well known for their high-quality sounds, but less so for affordable hardware in which to house them. Is the new £350 ME1 the answer?
A British company specialising in the maintenance and refurbishment of vintage Neve equipment have produced a new preamp design with a classic sound.
These two new rack processors from Vermona offer flexible filtering and phasing with a range of interesting modulation options.