The complete Winter NAMM 2000 Report is now online in our Sweetwater Reports area.
Winter NAMM 2000 Report
Part Six
MIDIMAN: Continuing a trend we saw this year, interface kings Midiman unleashed two USB MIDI interfaces. For use on both Mac and PC, the USB Midisport 1×1 and the USB Midisport 2×2 sport a sleek design and offer high-speed, dependable connection to USB-equipped PC or Apple computers.
Also in the “little-things-mean-a-lot” category were two digital thru boxes, the CT-14 and OT-14. The CT-14 and the OT-14 quadruple your Coaxial and Optical (respectively) access to digital devices.
Finally, a new entry into their Delta Series, the Delta 44, includes a PCI card connected to a sturdy analog break-out box. You get 4 x 4 I/O jacks. In many respects, it’s similar to the Delta 66, with the same 24-bit 96kHz converter section, but it’s made for the person who doesn’t need S/PDIF digital I/O.
AKAI: There was exciting news for the touring and performing musician at the Akai booth. Akai had a very cool new series of compact powered mixers. The AMX Series weigh less than 17 pounds and are housed in a composite flight case with a cover and a handle. When the gig is over, you just cover them up and carry them away like a suitcase. The 10-channel AMX10 ($699) and the 6-channel AMX6 ($599) are very efficient and feature digital effects, a high-quality mixing section with individual EQ, dual amps and more.
Akai was also showing some new ultralight stereo power amplifiers, the APX500 and the APX1000. These are high-efficiency PWM power amps. No price on these yet, but they sound promising.
Garnering a lot of attention was their new digital multitrack recorder, the DPS16 ($2,695, or 3,095 with 4-bus stereo multi-effects processor board), billing itself as the world’s first 24-bit/96kHz 16-track digital personal studio. It’s capable of 10 track simulataneous recording and 16 track simultaneous playback. There’s a 26 channel mixer section and a great internal effects section, with comprehensive editing features. In short, the DPS16 can handle everything from recording to mixdown. There’s also the DPS12i ($1649, or 1,949 with stereo multi-effect processor) another nifty digital multitrack that lets you master directly to CD-ROM.
For the low-end bass man, Akai offered two cool stomp boxes, the UB1 UniBass “sound-beefer-upper,” and the SB1 Deep Impact, a synth bass processor. The UB1 lets you “thicken” your sound by various effects like adding an octave, or distortion, or enabling you to play harmony lines by yourself. It’s great for filling out a band’s sound on stage. The SB1 lets you play those fat, funky synthesizer bass lines on your bass. You can edit the sounds to get exactly the tone you want, and there are nine programmable memories that let you switch sounds while you play.
And of course, where there’s bass effects pedals, there’s usually twice as many guitar pedals. First up is the W1 Variwah ($199), a box that gives you multiple wah: Pedal wah (there’s a traditional wah pedal), Touch wah and a Swell Wah feature all in one. The Swell Wah feature allows you to hit a chord or note and activate an oscillator which continues the wah-wah effect until the strings are muted. Sounds groovy. The D1 Shred-O-Matic ($299) also goes by the less lively name, the Tube/Solid-State Hybrid Distortion box. Whatever you call it, the 4 distortion modes are exceptional, giving guitarists a wide choice of distortion sounds. The effects are all tweakable. The E1 Headrush ($279) is a tap delay/tape echo simulator/looping recorder effects pedal. Features include 16-bit digital delay with a delay time from 0.5ms to 23.8 seconds, and the Tape Echo mode, which simulates an analog 4-head tape echo machine. Finally, there’s the P1 Intelliphase ($149), a cool sounding analog phaser with Soft Touch and Hard Touch mode.
And when you’re done ringing every last bit of freaky sound out of your axe, you can get it back in tune with the T1 Chromatic Tuner ($119), an extremely accurate, pro-quality tuner. A built-in mic lets you tune acoustic instruments, while a sleep mode automatically turns off the Tune Lock after 4 minutes of inactivity to save battery life.
Their RE32 ($2,495) is a professional multitrack remote controller for Akai’s 24-bit hard disk recorders. Its feature set is quite expansive, letting users easily control multiple DD8-plus and DR-16 Pro recorders, and giving them easy access to the front panel functions of their recorders. You also get sample accurate lock between multiple machines, even while jogging.
Finally, they also had a very cool variable tempo phrase sampler called the U400 ($249). It’s a compact device that gives you 35.7 seconds of recording time. Operation was very simple. You can playback the phrases at 2/3 and 1/2 speed without affecting the pitch, and easily isolate and loop a selected region. One of the coolest features for any instrumentalist who wants to learn their favorite solo perfectly is the Note Grabber, which takes you through a recording a single note at a time.
That’s about all we have space for in this “official” NAMM report. While we didn’t see everything at the show we found ourselves very optimistic at the end. There wasn’t too much that was wholly revolutionary, but we thought most of the products were more practical and better grounded in the concerns that most people have. There were fewer features for the sake of features and more things that applied to real world situations. This isn’t to say we don’t still have a ways to go, but it was one of the better shows in recent years. Much more info will be included in future issues of inSync so stay tuned there for further updates.
Have a nice weekend. We’ll see you back here Monday for our regularly scheduled inSync programming. You guys sent us a lot of questions over the past week. We’ll try to get to them all eventually.