Dave Smith Instruments SYNTHESIZERS

Loving my mono evolver, I've been lusting after the upcoming KB, and
thinking that maybe I could swing one with my summer bonus.

However the other day in a local music store, I noticed that they've
just dropped the prices of the Andromeda A6 dramatically[*], to the
point where it's competitive with the PE-KB (I guess this is the same
comparison that people in the more price-advantaged USA have already
been making... :-).

Anyway, I was playing with the A6, and it generally sounds very nice,
though not really the "perfect poly analogue".  Is there anybody on this
list that has both an A6 and a Polyevolver, and can offer some opinion
on how they compare after much use?

My initial impressions are:

  * A6 has nice filter resonance, seems a bit more useful for those
    filter-oriented sounds than the evolver's decent-but-plain filter.
    I liked the A6's filters a lot (though people seem to diss them
    constantly on various mailing lists...).

  * Pretty much every patch I listened to on the A6 had a kind of buzzy
    nasal character (not necessarily _bad_, but who knows it might be
    very annoying after a while).  The Evolver has that great
    big-clean-powerful digi-ana sound going down.

  * The "effects" (such as they are) on the Evolver are _much_ more
    interesting than the A6's plain-vanilla digital fx unit, but perhaps
    you can do some of the feedback etc. in the A6's analogue engine?

  * The evolver's sequencers are really nice, but the A6 seems to have
    some decent sequencing options too.

  * The A6 has acquired something of a bad reputation for being
    "flawed", e.g., with slow envelopes &c (which software updates
    apparently work around, but don't completely solve).

  * Obviously you get a lot more poly with the A6.

  * Visually, the Polyevolver KB is definitely better looking.

  * Same KB action :-)


-Miles

[*] This is in Japan, and they traditionally charge insane prices
    [before it was ~$4500 for the A6!] for megasynths like that, but the
    local Alesis distributor has recently changed to a smaller and much
    more competitive company.  Surprised the hell out of me, but ... yay!

-- 
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten.  [George Carlin]